JCMC - EP 5 - Katie Shilton and Jessica Vitak - FNT

SONIC Northwestern23min

Nicole Ellison

00:18

Welcome to The Discussion Section, JCMC’s own podcast. I'm Nicole Ellison, editor-in-chief of JCMC. And with me today, I am thrilled to welcome Jessica Vitak, who is one of our associate editors, and Katie Shilton. Jessica is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies and an affiliate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Maryland. She's also the director of the University's Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Her research evaluates the privacy and ethical implications of big data, the internet of things, and other “smart” technologies. Katie Shilton is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and leads the Ethics & Values in Design Lab. Her research explores ethics and policy for the design of information technologies. She is the PI of the PERVADE project, a multicampus collaboration focused on big data research ethics. Today, Jessica and Katie will speak with me about their work with the PERVADE project, which establishes norms and increases awareness of data ethics questions among researchers, journal editors and reviewers, IRBs, and other stakeholders. Welcome, Jessica and Katie.

Jessica Vitak

01:31

Happy to be here.

Katie Shilton

01:32

Thank you. Yeah, really pleased to be here.

Nicole Ellison

01:34

So, before we start, can you tell us a little bit about PERVADE and how it got started? And what are the key goals?

Katie Shilton

01:41

So PERVADE got started out of conversations with a whole bunch of colleagues who just starting to work on ethics and big data. So it was emerging as a question in many places 6 to 10 years ago, at conferences like CSCW. And actually, the Consortium for Sociotechnical Studies has an annual summer camp and a group of us got together there and had some time and were given some resources to brainstorm about, what can we bring to this conversation about ethics? People were asking for guidelines, and people were asking for norms. And we realized there were empirical questions that were unanswered in this space around norms. And those included things like, what are data scientists actually doing? What are they doing to think through the ethics of their own work and their own projects? Are they going to their IRBs? Are they not? If so, why or why not? So there are questions about research practices. There are also questions about what users expect. What do the people who generate pervasive data think about having their data used in research? Do they expect to be asked for consent? Do they not? Does it matter what kind of data it is? Does it matter what platform they're on? And then we also didn't know much about how IRBs were regulating this data, if at all.So actually, some of the early work Jessica and I did was about IRB practices around this data. So there were lots of people asking these questions and we thought, well, the best way to answer a bunch of these questions at once would be to have a collaboratory, to have a big group of people who could access similar data, who had different research skills, so survey researchers, and ethnographic researchers, and computer scientists doing measurements of risk. But we would all be in conversation with each other so that we could ask questions that move across all of these stakeholder groups, move across IRBs, users, and data scientists. So that's how PERVADE came to be. The National Science Foundation provided us with quite a bit of funding to coordinate a six-campus project. And here we are six-ish years later, and we have answers to a lot of those questions.

Nicole Ellison

03:30

I would love to hear you talk through each of these stakeholder groups that you mentioned, the researchers, social media users and participants, and then also the IRB and the folks who are trying to regulate this new world. What are some of the key findings or insights for each of these important groups?

Processing audio...