Documenting Personal and Community Stories Title slide Perry Collins Appetizer for a longer talk later in the week, focusing on how ethics and intellectual property come into play as we create oral histories and collect contemporary media Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash Perry Collins Digital Caribbean Studies Institute May 2019

How can we do this while fostering collaboration and trust? GUIDING QUESTIONS How can we center marginalized perspectives and people in teaching and scholarship? How can we do this while fostering collaboration and trust? As humanists, we are both qualified and responsible for considering these questions, but we are often doing so outside the purview of an IRB or international counterparts or, in some cases, within the scope of IRB guidelines that don’t fully take into account our relationships with the people we collaborate with.

ORAL HISTORIES Beginning with oral histories since this is a major focus of our work today. Again, this is a good example of work that in the United States falls outside IRB review but is rife with complex ethical considerations.

Approach 1: All rights belong to interviewer/collecting institution ORAL HISTORIES Reaching an agreement Approach 1: All rights belong to interviewer/collecting institution Approach 2: Interviewee owns copyright but agrees to share under certain conditions Approach 3: Interviewee and interviewer both own rights and agree to share Oral history agreement forms are often difficult because they add a legal element to a process that feels very personal. For many years, default practice was for interviewees to sign over rights to interviewer or collecting institution—or in some cases, to sign releases that more or less ignored copyright and assumed institutional ownership. But a form is crucial to establish understanding of the ways in which both parties—and everyone else—can use the resulting interview and ancillary materials. Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

ORAL HISTORIES Increasingly, best practice is to use some version of the agreement described in this 2012 blog post. This relies on a Creative Commons license, which I’ll discuss a bit further tomorrow, to balance the rights of the interviewee with the need to make oral histories available to a broader community. The main takeaway here is that we should never ask someone to give up ownership http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/a-creative-commons-solution/

Approach 1: All rights belong to interviewer/collecting institution ORAL HISTORIES Reaching an agreement Approach 1: All rights belong to interviewer/collecting institution Approach 2: Interviewee owns copyright but agrees to share under certain conditions Approach 3: Interviewee and interviewer both own rights and agree to share Now we have this approach. The interviewee owns the copyright but agrees to share in specific ways, typically through a Creative Commons license. The form SPOHP and the Libraries are beginning to implement just this year uses a noncommercial license. In practice, this means anyone wanting to incorporate the video into a commercial work—for instance, a textbook that is being sold—would need to get permission directly from the interviewee. This represents a pretty radical shift in academics’ willingness to cede control, but it might not feel that way since we’re still talking about signing a legal document. Encourage Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

SOCIAL MEDIA & WEB ARCHIVING Moving on to an area that has seen enormous growth in recent years and that has become an integral part of the digital humanities and public or community-based scholarship

SOCIAL MEDIA & WEB ARCHIVING Ethically collecting online content Approach 1: Public is public and preserving content is urgent Approach 2: Archiving without permission is always too high-risk Approach 3: We need to consider sensitivities, privacy, and user intent AND work toward greater community control Again, considering different approaches. All of these have advocates, but the last few years has seen an outpouring of resources and scholarship around Approach 3.

SOCIAL MEDIA & WEB ARCHIVING I don’t have time to delve into this work, which is coming from communities, from archivists, from humanists and social scientists—basically everyone alive has some stake in this conversation. But I want to highlight Documenting the Now, a Mellon-funded initiative that has taken on a crucial role as convener/tool builder/platform. This project is especially valuable, I think, because it exemplifies both the hack and yack of the digital humanities—how do we identify ethical challenges and encourage ongoing conversations and critique while also continuing to build and share and course correct over time. Strongly encourage a read of DocNow’s blog, which covers a lot of these issues in depth. https://www.docnow.io/ https://news.docnow.io/

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