College of Information Studies

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1631

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.ethics

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Responsible & Inclusive Cards
    (Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), 2023-04-23) Elsayed-Ali, Salma; Berger, Sara E.; Figueredo de Santana, Vagner; Sandoval, Juana Catalina Becerra
    Societal implications of technology are often considered after public deployment. However, broader impacts ought to be considered during the onset and throughout development to reduce potential for harmful uses, biases, and exclusions. There is a need for tools and frameworks that help technologists become more aware of broader contexts of their work and engage in more responsible and inclusive practices. In this paper, we introduce an online card tool containing questions to scaffold critical reflection about projects’ impacts on society, business, and research. We present the iterative design of the Responsible & Inclusive Cards and findings from five workshops (n=21 participants) with teams distributed across a multinational technology corporation, as well as interviews with people with disabilities to assess gameplay and mental models. We found the tool promoted discussions about challenging topics, reduced power gaps through democratized turn-taking, and enabled participants to identify concrete areas to improve their practice.
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    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.
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    Providing Culturally Responsive and Ethical Access To Indigenous Collections
    (Archival Outlook, 2019-05) Carpenter, Brian; Haynes, Caitlin; Marsh, Diana; Posas, Lisa; Punzalan, Ricardo L.; Rappaport, Gina; Stoner, Melissa
    SAA’s Code of Ethics states, “Archivists promote the respectful use of culturally sensitive materials in their care by encouraging researchers to consult with communities of origin, recognizing that privacy has both legal and cultural dimensions.” For repositories with Native archival materials, it’s especially important to develop clear guidelines for handling material. Six archivists share how their repositories are shifting policies and practices to promote respectful use of Native archival materials.
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    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.
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    Access Policies for Native American Archival Materials in the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
    (Society of American Archivists, 2020-10) Marsh, Diana E.; Leopold, Robert; Crowe, Katherine; Madison, Katherine S.
    This case study contributes to the history of collections access protocols by examining one repository’s policies and practices over a fifty-year period— those of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. It describes a series of archival programs and projects that occurred before, during, and after the development of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials in order to view changes in the archives’ access policies within a broader cultural and institutional milieu, presenting a more complex narrative than previously available. The case study assesses the influence of the Protocols as well as some challenges to the adoption of several recommendations. Finally, we make several proposals for archival repositories with comparable collections and constituencies.