Humanities scholars frequently see themselves as unconstrained by institutional review boards monitoring research protocols to detect potential ethical violations. Even the most well-intentioned humanists may see their objects of study as “texts” that are already “published” in some way or artifacts of the distant past rather than as information intertwined with identifiable human subjects who are vulnerable to loss of privacy harms, coercion, and exploitation, particularly when researchers seek to derive benefits from their lived experiences. Extractive language about “scraping” or “mining” data is still common, even though such metaphors reduce cultural products to raw materials and undermine much-needed credit and compensation for the intellectual labor of participants.
For example, in-group exchanges in born-digital formats on social media may seem to be freely available for collection by outsiders, but online conversations about topics such as Black Lives Matter take place with specific expectations about intended audiences and purposes. As André Brock (2020) has pointed out, interpreting Black online performance requires deep and sophisticated understanding of Black culture and norms of inclusion and exclusion. In response to large-scale initiatives to scrape “Black Twitter” and data from other prominent networked publics, Moya Bailey has called for DH scholars to rethink their commitments to informed consent to emphasize collaboration and ongoing renegotiation of existing agreements (2015). Similarly, Amy Earhart (2019) has emphasized building trust as a precondition for DH work and an ethic of reciprocity and respect. Many exemplary DH projects by scholars in Black Studies foreground a model in which knowledge is co-created with participating communities. Unfortunately, too often “digitizing the study of slavery threatens to replicate the death work of the slave ship register,” as Jessica Marie Johnson (2018) has argued, and even DH projects that center social justice may fail to document the joy and pleasure of Black life (Gallon, 2022).
Although the digital humanities community and digital social scientists who study internet practices tend to be divided by their disciplinary training, more shared dialogue about ethical methods would likely be beneficial to both groups. The Association of Internet Researchers has over two decades of experience developing guidelines for observing and participating in digital behavior. There is also a sizable literature in AoIR devoted to the visibility work of the research subjects themselves as they make choices about generating and curating their digital content for specific audiences on particular platforms (Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Tiidenberg and, 2015; Marwick and boyd, 2014; boyd, 2014; Ito et al., 2019; Senft and Baym, 2015). The literature in surveillance studies (Gates, 2011; Benjamin, 2019; Browne, 2015; Cheney-Lippold, 2019; Zuboff, 2019) should also be considered by DH researchers.
In responding to the “responsibility” and “reinvention” theme of the conference, this presentation from a longtime member of the digital humanities community draws on ideas from Wendy Chun to explore three key paradigms in the ethics of DH work: 1) visibility, 2) transparency, and 3) exposure. To frame these different experiences of archival legibility, this presentation initially focuses on three DH projects designed to challenge political power and elevate activist collaborators: Torn Apart / Separados, The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kiev, and Danger, Jane Roe! The presenter will argue that these paradigms potentially apply to all DH projects, including those that draw from digitized repositories of printed material or manuscripts from pre-digital cultural production.
Moreover, the optics of a given DH project may change over the course of its lifetime. Torn Apart began as a visibility project to map the locations of migrant family members separated from each other at the U.S./Mexico border. As a visibility project, it served both a practical purpose as a means for contact and reunification and a rhetorical purpose in providing evidence of an abuse of power to legal advocates, journalists, and activists. In Volume Two Torn Apart became a transparency project designed to reveal how different entities and institutions benefitted from the immigration enforcement industry. Many who had worked on the Torn Apart project had previously worked together to improve maps of Puerto Rico to get aid to victims of Hurricane Maria. In that case, the project promoted the visibility of citizens in need while also exposing the shortcomings of Google Maps and the cartography of the colonial era.
The unintended consequences of potential exposure is dramatized by Lev Manovich’s 2015 project, The Exceptional and the Everyday, which visualizes a large corpus of images uploaded to Instagram during the 2013-14 Maidan revolution in Ukraine. The project documents the visual culture around a specific social movement, which spans from banal images of domestic life to tumultuous conflicts between protestors and security forces. Although Manovich worked closely with activists, his project assumed a geopolitical stability that no longer exists after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia and serves as a reminder that documentation of the activities of political dissidents during a period of perceived security does not ensure continuing safety. Later work to document the Ukrainian experience in the SUCHO project assumed the presence of bad actors and the impossibility of imagining future emergencies (LeBlanc et al., 2022).
Rather than produce a standard data visualization that privileges the optical register, it is also possible to create what Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio have called a “data visceralization” (2020) that impacts its audience through embodied experiences rather than what they call “Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints.” Kim Brillante Knight’s Danger, Jane Roe! exemplifies this kind of embodied intervention in DH work, which she describes as “removing data visualization from the screen or page and placing it on a body” (2018) to understand hidden reproductive rights issues and the dystopian possibilities for exposure if one is known to violate abortion regulations.
In these three DH projects visibility, transparency, and exposure must be negotiated in contested political territory, as DH scholars collaborate with activists to publicize causes. Transparency initiatives focused on a range of other issues – including documenting the redlining of neighborhoods, creating police violence maps, tracking evictions, and revealing the influence of tech lobbyists -- provide ways for DH scholars to consider the positive possibilities of visibility and the negative possibilities of exposure in more traditional forms of DH work.
Using this framework, which draws from the lessons of born-digital materials, the presenter will conclude by describing and theorizing first-person experiences as a DH practitioner working with pre-digital and hybrid-digital archival sources and leading the Equality Lab in a region of the United States known for long histories of homophobia and racism. The presenter will articulate the challenges of working closely with partner organizations to choose tools and platforms that are appropriate for audiences from marginalized communities that may have good reason for being distrustful of academic institutions. The presenter will analyze several DH partnership case studies, including an LGBTIQ oral history project and two projects concerned with the lives of those enslaved and their descendants. In making the case for a human subjects approach that is informed by the digital social sciences, the presenter will apply the scholarly literature about “forgotten” individuals (Crossen-White, 2015), the ethical dilemmas of oral history (Bradley and Puri, 2017), the capacity of computational research to disambiguate anonymous subjects (Ess, 2014), and the potential for digital humanities projects ultimately to enhance research ethics in the university (Proferes, 2020).