This week, I’ve been reading up on archival and maintenance systems, with a special eye to digital scholarship. How do we store and maintain things? How are systems designed to facilitate their own updates, and to keep their contents both safe and accessible?

 

What I’m talking about has a couple of different aspects attached to it, since there are a lot of different factors in data storage. Here are some quick questions to ask when it comes to archiving your work:

• Who is the entity organizing this storage?
  Different entities store different data for different reasons and in different ways. Consider: Google Books, the Gould Library, JSTOR, the Internet Archives

• What types of information are being stored?
  Consider file formats, storage limits, and what types of information the storing body might prioritize (and why).

• When was this system created, and how is it being maintained?
  Digital systems require maintenance, just like physical ones. Old websites are hard to navigate; outdated software can cause security issues.

• Where is your information stored, and where is it accessible?
  Is your paper being paywalled? Can the people who need to find it, find it? And conversely, is the storing entity capable of secure storage?

• Why is this entity storing your information?
  Have they expressed a commitment to the long-term accessibility of knowledge? Do they have a profit motive (and, if they lose profits, will that commitment waver)?

• How is this entity demonstrating their commitment to preserving information?
  Are they transparent with their motives, their methods, and their means? Are they likely to waver in difficult times?

 

No system is perfect, but looking to an entity’s motives and methods can be particularly illuminating. Also worth investigating is how comparable companies that have shut down dealt with their records, whether they kept them after closing down, and whether those items are still accessible by their creators, or by the general public.

 

Vine, for example, hosted short videos which could be made through its phone app, but went defunct after struggling to find a way to consistently monetize its content. The site still has videos available to view and to download, but people can no longer post new videos, and I couldn’t find a source on whether creators can remove their old videos or control who can see them.

 

Moving forward, I’ll continue looking into how digital systems are maintained and what they might store; this will also tie into a side project I’m working on, where I will be researching the history of the internet.

This being the second in a series of weekly blog posts, intended to edify the public on the various goings-on within the ethical strata of the Digital Scholarship community of Carleton, particularly with regards to…

I kid, I kid. Here’s a quick catch-up on what I’ve been doing this week!

The process of my work has been primarily logistical, getting up and running for the rest of term. I’ve been exploring various topics, deciding which ones are worth pursuing, and solidifying them into project ideas and questions to answer. I’ve determined four projects/areas of research, two major and two supporting, which I’ve outlined below and which feed into each other in various ways.

After some exploration, my common question for this term will be regarding the tradeoffs between organizational affordances in the cloud, and data security. This will consist of testing various organizational systems, seeing what conveniences they offer and what drawbacks, and researching how this data is stored and what it might be used for. I will also be keeping an eye on project logistics and multi-person information/storage systems, because my major project will center around open source software.

The Digital Scholarship Interns’ winter 2019 project will consist of revamping our website and, in the process, exploring the history of collaboration, accessibility and performance in web design. Part of my job will be examining open source communities and how they work with each other, as well as how that workflow affects the final product of their projects and designs.

In addition, I will be following up on my earlier data security question by looking at some common sites used by colleges for logistical purposes, investigating their practices, and researching the laws being passed about data security which affect those sites. Some of the writeups on these topics may not be made public, but rest assured, I’m looking!

And finally, I will also be engaging in a side project of mine, which is to develop my coding skills, particularly in the programming language Ruby. I’m hoping to learn more about Ruby on Rails, and possibly use it in order to build a web-based presentation of my research for the DSI project.

Happy Week 2!

The theme for UXPA 2019 was, as far as I could tell, empathy. Empathy, caring and careful design, came up in as a refrain frequently, and when it wasn’t mentioned outright, it was implicit. This focus on thoughtfulness extended both within and without, which I found very interesting. I would expect a conference for UX Design to be, necessarily, concerned with the experience of others; I anticipated less the theme of kindness to oneself.

SPEAKER SUMMARIES

Keynote speaker Vivianne Castillo gave a talk titled “The Siren Call of Self-Neglect”, where she talked about the potential for burnout, and the necessity of self-care. While traffic meant we arrived partway through, I did manage to note down her focus on communication. She made two key points. Firstly, managers should make it clear that team members can be vulnerable with them, encouraging communication not just when things are going well but also when things are going poorly. Support systems can’t be built after they’re needed. Secondly, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel on discussions of ethics and other relevant fields. Those working in UX should explore other disciplines and talk to people working in those areas. Castillo also shared a Google Drive folder full of resources on self care and mindfulness, as well as some resources for white people who wish to educate themselves on racial privilege without burdening people of color. This folder is available in the supplemental materials below.

Abby Bajuniemi’s talk, “I don’t talk like that! Research Methods and Ethics for Natural Language Interaction”, was less an exploration of digital design and more an examination of experimental ethics and how we communicate. The speaker touched on the fact that language, despite being an arbitrary social construct, is still a factor in discrimination and can be used to uphold ideologies of race, gender, and other identities. She then went on to discuss the ethics of experimental design, particularly in conveying information about the experiment to the participants and in eliciting usable data without infringing on the subjects’ privacy rights. While Bajuniemi did not have strict recommendations regarding these ethical questions, she was firm in her policies: make it clear to participants what is being collected, how it will be stored, and how it can be accessed/who will have access. She suggested hiring an interpreter or translator if there is doubt that the participants will understand the experimenter fully. Her appearance on a linguistics podcast, also mentioned in her presentation, is included in the supplemental materials.

“Interruptions: Living in a World of Divided Attention” was the third presentation, given by Molly Hillstrom. Hillstrom outlined the cost of distractions in the workplace and in people’s personal lives, citing statistics regarding quality of work and mental health. This topic was integrated with the idea of design when Hillstrom called on designers to be careful, compassionate, and sparing in their use of notifications, to stop using features like autoplay and infinite scroll which make it easy for people to get ‘sucked in’, and to make it easy for people to adjust preferences which will help them not get distracted. There were no supplemental materials.

Ellen Lucast presented “Opportunities and Challenges in the Voice Interaction Space”, which discussed the potential work required for true voice interaction (creating conversations, rather than programs like Alexa and Siri which have designated responses for specific statements). Much of this presentation was theoretical, and went over my head in regards to its technical aspects, but my primary takeaway was what Lucast called Grice’s Maxims, a set of rules for communication. In quick, simplified summary, they are: be truthful; give the right amount of information; be relevant; be brief and orderly. These rules were interesting to me because of the tension they suggest between usefulness and kindness. Grice’s Maxims seem, on the surface, designed to facilitate useful communication, but they also seem to allow for conversations which are trustworthy, interesting, thoughtful and intelligible. While they are good design principles for practical reasons, they also continue the theme of thinking about users as people. No supplemental materials were included in the presentation.

McLean Donnelly’s presentation, “An Accessibility Case Study: Expedia”, outlined the initiative Donnelly took to help Expedia make its website more accessible. He gave a series of steps, which touched on initial proposals, research, an internal audit of the system, and the feedback and design cycle, among other aspects. These steps gave transparency and a good model to people who might wish to undertake similar initiatives at their own workplace. Donnelly’s work was a practical expression of the design philosophies at play throughout UXPA. He included multiple recommended resources to help practice and learn about accessible design, and recommended people draft accessibility policies for their organization as well as practicing skills-based volunteerism. His resources are listed in the supplemental materials.

Liz Tupper’s talk, “Empowering People through Tech”, discussed human-centric/empathetic design, and a design initiative that centered the needs of the users. She emphasized the need to listen to feedback given during the testing phases, and outlined four steps for empathetic design. First, engage with people in their own space; facilitate collaborative creativity; test and get feedback from the people you seek to help; and organize a support structure for the tech and for the people the tech is supposed to exist. This talk, like Donnelly’s, gave very practical examples of design steps and brainstorming practices, but these examples were centered more around getting ideas from the users the product was intended for. Tupper did not include supplemental materials, though her design exercises may be part of a future blog post.

Beth McKeever presented a talk called “Symbiotic Product Relationships”, which, rather than exploring empathy for the user or empathy for the self, discussed the ways in which UX designers can foster good working relationships with their coworkers, particularly their product managers. Her advice once more came down to communication. Knowing each others’ strengths and weaknesses, attending meetings together in order to facilitate detailed discussion, gaining comfort disagreeing with each other, and constructively talking about office culture were all things McKeever considered vital to a working relationship. In fact, she recommended overcommunicating when building a new relationship, in order to set up that foundation of openness. McKeever also mentioned a book on developing a culture, included in the supplemental materials.

The closing talk was given by Jeff Sussna, titled “Beyond the Designer as Auteur”. In contrast to some prior speakers, Sussna’s consideration for the user’s experience framed the experience as an ongoing service, rather than as a one-time consumable product. The example he gave was of food: a candy bar not only fills you up and tastes nice, but it also gives you energy that you take with you throughout your day. Ultimately, Sussna stated that design was less about features and more about outcomes. He also discussed complex/emergent systems, the potential for failure, and the need to lean into chaos and learning from a) system failures and b) the creative/unintentional uses consumers find for a product. My favorite part of this presentation was a quote of Sussna’s which I found both evocative and lovely: “What problems might our solutions create?” Sussna also recommended several books, which are listed in the supplemental materials.

PERSONAL TAKEAWAYS:

UXPA 2019 was a challenge for me to condense down to a few words on the ethics of UX. In part this was due to the fact that each speaker’s talk touched on ethics, but some did so obliquely or veiled through a different topic. The conference was less concerned with setting out specific ethical principles or guidelines, and more concerned with exploring the ways in which we treat people with respect and dignity. At the core, this is what designing experience should be: carefully considering the feelings, needs and rights of the person whose experience is being designed. While the nature of the conference placed emphasis on interaction through questions, I am looking forward to investigating the exercises and resources recommended by presenters which merge empathy with UX design.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS:

Vivianne Castillo:

 

“Vivianne’s UX Self-Care Resources”: bit.ly/uxselfcare

Abby Bajuniemi:

 

The Vocal Fries podcast, “Bilingualism isn’t Just for White Kids”: https://vocalfriespod.com/2019/04/16/episode-37-bilingualism-isnt-just-for-white-kids-shownotes/

 

McLean Donnelly:

 

Accessibility for Everyone, by Laura Kalbag: https://laurakalbag.com/book/

“UX Accessibility”, by Doug Collins through Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/classes/UX-Design-For-Accessibility/166696059

The Makery Group’s Accessibility Policy: https://www.themakerygroup.com/accessibility-policy.html

 

Beth McKeever:

 

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful, by Daniel Coyle: http://danielcoyle.com/the-culture-code/

 

Jeff Sussna:

 

Design for Dasein, by Thomas Wendt: https://www.amazon.com/Design-Dasein-Understanding-Experiences/dp/1506166539/

How Do Committees Invent?, by Melvin E. Conway: http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

Drift Into Failure, by Sidney Dekker: https://www.amazon.com/Drift-into-Failure-Sidney-Dekker/dp/1409422216

Designing Delivery, by Jeff Sussna: https://www.sussna-associates.com/book

 

 

 

The common theme to my work as the Ethics Intern this term has been anonymization, particularly of data. The two projects taking the bulk of my attention both deal with the requirements of ethical data collection; one in a practical manner, one in a theoretical. First is my work with the Public Memory of Myanmar project, on behalf of Professor Tun Myint; second is my research into the Institutional Review Board and its requirements for Carleton.

The Public Memory of Myanmar project is an ongoing effort to document daily life in Burma/Myanmar, in various towns and cities around the country. The Carleton Political Science department sponsors an annual trip, organized by Tun Myint, where participants photograph and interview locals. Burma/Myanmar is a politically turbulent area, and the Public Memory exists in order to preserve ways of life that are in jeopardy and to put narratives of life into those people whose experiences may not be depicted in the official political narratives put out by the state. However, this political turbulence also means that local people participating in this project may be in danger if they can be identified. Much of my work this term has therefore consisted of going through each item in the collection (a photograph/video, accompanied by descriptive metadata) and combing through the information associated with each object in order to find any specific names or locations that could be used to identify individuals.

This focus on the particulars of individual data also comes up in my other major project, which has been to do research with regards to the Institutional Review Board at Carleton, the standards it must meet, and the standards it must uphold. The IRB is an overseeing body at Carleton that approves project proposals for work which involves research using human subjects. These proposals must explain what data they wish to collect, how they will collect it, and what their plans are for safe storage. These concerns come up most frequently with regards to the psychology and economics departments. However, it is definitely possible for other fields to propose projects that fall under the purview of the IRB. The regulations the IRB is subject to are relevant to the library and to digital scholarship because the library is responsible for the storage of data after it is collected by student researchers (it must be kept for a minimum of three years after the study is concluded, according to federal law). Carleton is also subject to GDPR regulations where data collection overlaps with GDPR jurisdiction (data collected in regards to people currently located in the EU falls under this jurisdiction). 

Ethical data collection under the IRB involves looking not only at which pieces of information are collected, but how these pieces might work together to identify an individual even if personal IDs are not collected. For example, while collecting college ID numbers or Social Security numbers would make participants easy to identify and therefore would not be allowable under the IRB, collecting, for example, age, gender, hometown and current dorm creates the potential to identify specific individuals by combining this information. Finding, for example, a 23-year-old woman from Albany living in a specific building is a distinct possibility based on collected data which the researcher might not even mean to use.

You can see why it’s been difficult for me to come up with a visual to convey the work I’ve done this term, since so much of my work centered on stripping away identity. In the end, what I settled for was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Please enjoy Sanitized Data, by Pilot Irwin (2019).