UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Creepy or Cool? An Exploration of Non-Malicious Deepfakes Through Analysis of Two Case Studies(2022) Cleveland, Keaunna; Shilton, Katie; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Several studies have examined the harms associated with the development of deepfake technology and its use by malicious actors, but less research has been devoted to deepfakes created by non-malicious creators and the ways people react to deepfakes developed without malicious intent. This study attempts to close this research gap through the exploration of two case studies that demonstrate non-malicious deepfake use on Instagram and Twitter. Using sensemaking, privacy as contextual integrity, and audience theory to guide the analysis of publicly available posts, tweets, and records, this study examines how people interact with and react to non-malicious deepfakes online. Building on these findings, this thesis suggests how social media platforms might integrate signifiers in their design that afford sensemaking for those interacting with deepfake technology and discusses how ethical frameworks and practices from values-oriented design and value-based engineering in design may help guide creators as they develop deepfake technology videos and applications for non-malicious purposes.Item CODE ME A GOOD REASON: JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM AND A RHETORIC OF ETHICAL AI(2021) Yang, Misti Hewatt; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Joseph Weizenbaum was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor often credited with creating the first chatbot, or automated computer conversationalist, in 1966. He named it ELIZA. Ten years later, however, he wrote Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, a book questioning the ethics of natural language processing, AI, and instrumental reason. This dissertation presents Weizenbaum as an early 20th century rhetorical theorist of computation. With an understanding of rhetoric as the material means for generating good reasons for living together, I articulate how Weizenbaum’s rhetorical interventions around the early development of computational culture can inform the ethics of engineering broadly and the development of AI specifically. The first chapter provides an overview of my historical and theoretical framework. The second chapter starts with Weizenbaum’s childhood and ends with the release of ELIZA. The third chapter chronicles his growing disillusionment with computers in society in the context of the Vietnam War. The final two chapters are dedicated to the book and reactions from a prominent figure in the history of AI, John McCarthy. Informed by Weizenbaum, I recuperate rhetoric as a practice of reason composed of technē that requires phronêsis in order to be realized in its full ethical potential. I argue that recognizing the practice of rhetoric inherent in engineering and ethics can better equip engineers and the public to manage scientific and technological uncertainty with the care necessary for a humane future.Item Understanding and Intervening in Machine Learning Ethics: Supporting Ethical Sensitivity in Training Data Curation(2020) Boyd, Karen L; Shilton, Katie; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite a great deal of attention to developing mitigations for ethical concerns in Machine Learning (ML) training data and models, we don’t yet know how these interventions will be adopted and used. Will they help ML engineers find and address ethical concerns in their work? This dissertation seeks to understand ML engineers’ ethical sensitivity (ES)— their propensity to notice, analyze, and act on socially impactful aspects of their work—while curating training data. A systematic review of ES (Chapter 2) addresses conflicts of conceptualization in prior work by developing a new framework describing three activities (recognition, particularization, and judgment); argues that ES offers a useful way to describe, evaluate, and intervene in ethical technology development; and argues that the methods and perspectives of social computing can offer richer methods and data to studies of ES. A think aloud study (Chapter 3) tests this framework by using ES to compare engineers working with unfamiliar training data, finding that engineers with Datasheets noticed ethical issues earlier and more frequently than those without; finding that participants relied on Datasheets extensively while particularizing; and rendering rich descriptions of recognition and particularization in facial recognition data curation. Chapter 4 uses Value Sensitive Design to "design up,'' mitigating harms by helping machine learning engineers particularize their ethical concerns and find appropriate technical tools. It introduces ES to studies of social computing, contributes a novel method for studying ES, offers rich data about how it functions in ML development, describes insights for designing context documents and other interventions designed to encourage ES, develops an extensible digital guide that supports particularization and judgment, and points to new directions for research in ethical sensitivity in technology development.Item American Hospitality: The Politics of Conditionality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction(2020) Gleich, Lewis S; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withholding, of invitation and rejection, of accommodation and imposition) and figures of hospitality (hosts and guests, strangers and trespassers, homes and thresholds, gifts and reciprocations) for three specific purposes: first, to reproduce dominant American discourses of hospitality; second, to critique these same discourses; and third, to model an alternative ethics of hospitality. Faced with the closing of the western frontier, rapid increases in immigration, the growing need to provide assistance to large segments of the population, an escalating call to secure and police the national borders, and the widespread demand to make public accommodations in all parts of the country more hospitable to racialized others, U.S. authors during the twentieth century utilized discourses of hospitality to reflect on the effects that sweeping historical changes were having on the nation’s ability to remain hospitable to peoples both inside and outside its borders. In examining discourses of hospitality in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, American Hospitality makes three principal contributions to scholarship. First, it opens the canon of American literature to reconstruction by tracing the central importance of scenes of hospitality across a wide range of twentieth-century American texts and genres, from highly canonical texts like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to less canonical texts like Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus. Second, it expands on existing work on the subject of American exceptionalism by showing how American exceptionalist narratives rely heavily on scenes and figures of hospitality to justify and disavow acts of exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and violence. Third, it lays the foundation for theorizing an alternative ethics of American hospitality. Modeled by the texts featured in American Hospitality, this alternative ethics, which I term affirmative hospitality, has four core principles: recognition of the conditional nature of all hospitality exchanges, affirmation of the singularity of the individual, accommodation, and deliberation.Item EXPLORIGN PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTITIONERS’ ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING AT WORK: A WHOLE-PERSON, PROCESSUAL, AND CONTEXTUAL LENS(2019) Guo, Jiankun; Anderson, Lindsey B.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The topic of ethics is gaining importance and urgency, particularly for public relations, a field responsible for communicating and building relationships between organizations and publics. While normative ethical theories abound in this discipline, tensions exist between traditional theories privileging rationality, autonomy, universality, and professional ethics, and emerging theories that value emotions, relationships, contexts, and personal ethics. Furthermore, practitioners’ ethical decision making process in their embedded organizational, industry, and sociopolitical environments has not been fully addressed. This dissertation fills in these research gaps by exploring public relations practitioners’ meaning making of ethics and thereby reconciliating tensions between traditional and emerging ethical theories (RQ1), detailing practitioners’ ethical decision making (EDM) process from a whole-person perspective (RQ2), and assessing how micro, meso, and macro level ethicality interact from a participants’ point of view (RQ3). 37 semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with current or past U.S. public relations practitioners who represent a variety of work settings, industries, specializations, and sectors. Interviews were transcribed and data were coded thematically and analyzed abductively. Findings suggested that practitioners constructed the meaning of ethics primarily via their concerns for work and organizational-public relationships, contextual particulars, and an alignment of personal and professional ethics. They utilized a variety of cognitive, emotional, intuitive, imaginative, and discursive skills during their ethical decision making (EDM) process exhibiting a whole-person based approach to EDM. Additionally, practitioners’ ethicality was both a result of contextual influences as well as a contributor to higher levels of ethical standards for their environment—on organizational, industry, and societal levels. Theoretical and methodological implications were drawn from the findings, so were practical implications provided in terms of ethics training programs.Item TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST IN JOURNALISM: AN EXAMINATION OF VALUES, PRACTICES AND EFFECTS(2015) Koliska, Michael; Steiner, Linda; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Journalism scholars and practitioners have repeatedly argued that transparency is crucial to generate trust in the news media, which, over the years, has faced continues decline in public trust. As news organizations have been encouraged to implement transparency in their daily work, transparency has increasingly gained the status of a professional norm in journalism. However, very little is actually known about how journalists think and apply transparency in their everyday practices or how news organizations in the United States implement transparency. Similarly, normative assumptions about the trust-generating effects of transparency have not been consistently shown to exist. This dissertation examined to what extent journalists at 12 national news outlets embraced transparency on a day-to-day basis and how these news organizations implement transparency online at the news item level. Moreover, this dissertation tested whether existing features of transparency (hyperlinks, editorial explanations, corrections, staff biographies etc.) impact audiences’ trust perception of a news story. The results of the mixed method approach showed that transparency in journalism is far from being a professional norm, which guides journalists’ news production processes. An analysis of 27 in-depth interviews found that journalists rarely consider transparency in their work. Journalists agreed that the notion of transparency has value. They repeatedly suggested that the news outlets they work for utilize transparency as a promotional tool to engage audiences and to appear transparent, rather than significantly disclosing information about the inner workings of their news organization. The results of the content analysis supported this claim as the findings show that the transparency features news organizations currently use provide little information for audiences to learn about how journalism is done. Meanwhile, the results of two experiments indicate that participants may not recognize the intended meanings of the varied transparency features, as participants’ trust perception did not vary across different transparency conditions. The findings of this dissertation suggest that transparency in journalism is still a goal rather than reality. News organizations have not opened up to the extent that they may be understood as transparent organizations; instead their efforts to pull back the curtain so that audiences may see the inner workings of newsrooms can be considered translucent at best.Item Bureaucratic Discretion: Citizen Officials and the Choice to Resist(2014) Hoffman, Christopher Andrew; Alford, C. F.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the realm of political theory, absolutism has largely dictated the conception of bureaucratic duty. Thus the ideal has seen bureaucrats as bound to obey the dictates of the sovereign, usually seen as the body that makes law. Empirical approaches to public administration have, quite naturally, pointed out that human beings, even bureaucrats, do not merely follow orders. Yet, even if one adopts an approach that sees the problem in terms of principle and agent, the concern remains of ensuring that the sovereign controls the official. I argue that this perspective has overshadowed the republican tradition, which saw magistrates as citizens first. In other words, there is a long tradition in political theory that offers scope for officials to exercise discretion on behalf of their political communities through acts of positive resistance. Mere passivity in the form of resignation or non-compliance is sometimes insufficient. A republican conception of magistrates has long afforded these officials the capacity to act on how they see things. The need for an emphasis on this approach increases as the political community itself becomes increasingly incapable through lack of knowledge or information of acting in its own interests. In fact, it sometimes happens that officials alone possess the knowledge necessary to take action on behalf of the community. The republican tradition provides a basis for rationalizing this in theoretical terms once we accept that all officials today are both citizens and magistrates in the traditional sense.Item The Metaphysics and Ethics of Copyright(2008-04-14) Hick, Darren Hudson; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Copyright, broadly defined, is a legal form of proprietary ownership of authored works, including literary, pictorial, musical, and selected other intellectual kinds. Ideally, one who is familiar with the law should know whether something they have created is protected by copyright (and to what extent), and whether some action they take will infringe a copyright. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Rather, established copyright law gives rise to a host of problems, including legal decisions and established doctrines that are alternatively arbitrary, counterintuitive, and contradictory. My central argument is that these problems arise from a failure in copyright law to recognize the nature of its objects, authored works, and that a coherent and stable approach to copyright must be built upon such an understanding. To this end, I outline an ontology of authored works suitable for grounding both the legal and ethical domains of copyright. Centrally, I contend, a reasonable understanding of copyright depends on grasping four composite dimensions of authored works: their atomic dimension--the parts of which they are composed, and the selection and arrangement of these parts; their causal dimension--their contexts of creation and instantiation, and the weak and strong historical links that connect a given work to others; their abstract dimension--that all such works are best understood as type/token entities capable of multiple instantiation; and their categorial dimension--that multiple works belonging to mutually-exclusive categories can be embodied in the same physical object. On an understanding of these factors, I establish conditions for the copyrightability of authored works, for the infringement of these copyrights, and for the creation of "derivative works." Finally, I consider the right of copyright. First showing how the strongest contenders for grounding this right--the Lockean and Constitutional approaches--fail to align with our understanding of authored works, I sketch an alternative approach--one based on the author's creativity as realized in the authored work--building on the ontological account outlined above, and for establishing the extent of this right, including its duration and when it might be infringed without amounting to a violation of the right.Item For the End is a Limit: The Question Concerning the Environment(2007-06-04) Orhan, Ozguc; Conca, Ken; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that Aristotle's philosophy of praxis (i.e., ethics and politics) can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary question concerning the environment. Thinking seriously about the environment today calls for resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions about Aristotle's irrelevance to the environment on historicist grounds of incommensurability or the fact that Aristotle did not write specifically on environmental issues as we know them. It is true that environmental problems are basically twentieth-century phenomena, but the larger normative discourses in which the terms "environmental" and "ecological" and their cognates are situated should be approached philosophically, namely, as cross-cultural and trans-historical phenomena that touch human experience at a deeper level. The philosophical perspective exploring the discursive meaning behind contemporary environmental praxis can reveal to us that certain aspects of Aristotle's thought are relevant, or can be adapted, to the ends of environmentalists concerned with developmental problems. I argue that Aristotle's views are already accepted and adopted in political theory and the praxis of the environment in many respects. In the first half of the dissertation, I explore the common ground between contemporary theorizing on the ethical and political aspects of environmental issues and Aristotelian ethics and politics. The second half of the dissertation locates the contemporary relevance of Aristotle in the recently emerging studies of "environmental virtue ethics" as well as "environmental citizenship" and "conservative environmentalism."Item Imagining Other Worlds: Literary Constructions of Alterity through Music(2007-05-14) Bushnell, Cameron Fae; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The late twentieth century has seen a significant increase in the number of literary texts turning to music for thematic content and structural form. I read musical forms as structuring or articulating new forms of nationalism, identity formation, community, memory, and exile. Using vocabulary from postcolonial theory, I argue that sites of alterity identifiable in music challenge existing, dominant cultural formations, promote ethical orientation towards others, and suggest openness to human interrelations. The texts that anchor my study articulate an aesthetic humanism that proposes the musical arts as non-confrontational conceptions of self and other, of the individual and society. In the introduction to their provocatively entitled anthology, Dangerous Liaisons, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat insist on the value of a "contrapuntal juxtaposition" of multiculturalism in the U.S. context and postcolonialism in the international sphere. This phrase - contrapuntal juxtaposition - encapsulates the motivation for my dissertation. On the one hand, my work is contrapuntal in its interdisciplinarity. Revising the critical successes of musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Jeffrey Kallberg, who use feminist and genre theories to interrogate the gender politics readable in musical structures, harmonic progressions, and tonal qualities, I employ theories and practices of Western music to read the cultural, social, and political strategies for subject positioning and human interrelations employed by late-twentieth century novels and poetry. On the other hand, my study juxtaposes American ethnic and postcolonial writings. I use a contested scope for postcolonial literatures in order to focus on sites that might be considered "mature" in their postcoloniality and to find conditions of entrenched and deeply conflicting ideological positions. I contend that musical elements provide a means to critique dominant cultural ideologies and social constructions from within European Enlightenment, of which Western music is a product.