Funding: UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive Co-Directing Project to Help Text Data Mining Researchers Navigate Cross-Border Legal and Ethical Issues

From an Announcement Posted by the UC Berkeley Library & Internet Archive:

We are excited to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded nearly $50,000 to UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining. The funding was made possible through NEH’s Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program.

NEH funding for the project, entitled Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (“LLTDM-X”), will support research and analysis to address law and policy issues faced by U.S. digital humanities practitioners whose text data mining research and practice intersects with foreign-held or -licensed content, or involves international research collaborations.

LLTDM-X builds upon the highly successful Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Institute (Building LLTDM), previously funded by the NEH in 2019. UC Berkeley Library directed Building LLTDM in June 2020, bringing together expert faculty from across the country to train 32 digital humanities researchers on how to navigate law, policy, ethics, and risk within text data mining projects. (All of the results and impacts are summarized in the white paper here.)

In Building LLTDM’s instructional sessions and post-workshop evaluations, participants identified cross-border research collaborations as an ongoing and critical legal and policy problem, and they also noted that foreign law and ethics issues pervaded their research. UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services partnered with Internet Archive to begin to address these essential needs, and LLTDM-X sprung to life.

[Clip]

Our long-term goal is to design instructional materials and institutes to support digital humanities TDM scholars facing cross-border issues, but our first step with LLTDM-X is getting a better handle on the specific law and policy challenges they face.

Through a series of virtual roundtable discussions, and accompanying legal research and analysis, LLTDM-X will surface these cross-border issues and begin to distill preliminary guidance to help scholars in navigating them.

The first roundtable will engage U.S. digital humanities text data mining practitioners in sharing their cross-border TDM experiences. U.S. and global law and ethics experts will help guide the roundtable discussion to elicit the contours of practitioner experiences. During two subsequent roundtables—one focusing on cross-border copyright and licensing, and another on cross-border privacy and ethics—the experts will discuss practitioners’ hurdles in depth, and begin to develop customized guidance.

[Clip]

The team for LLTDM-X (introduced below) is eager to get started. The project is co-directed by Thomas Padilla, Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services at Internet Archive.

“LLTDM-X responds strategically to a pervasive challenge that needlessly complicates, inhibits, and weakens the fullest potential of research. This work paves a critical path toward building future training institutes that address cross-border legal issues in TDM. At Internet Archive we’re committed to supporting universal access to all knowledge—LLTDM-X couldn’t be more clearly aligned with what we hope to achieve. We look forward to working with our partners at UC Berkeley Library and the wider community to advance this work.”

Rachael Samberg, who leads UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services and oversaw Building LLTDM, joins Thomas as co-director and explains that:

“We are ready to begin analyzing and sorting out the complex legal challenges for digital humanities TDM researchers. We’ve already secured an incredible group of international legal and ethics experts to conduct the analyses, and will share more on that soon. In the meantime, we are gearing up to build out an even larger group of participating scholars whose experiences will help us create case studies.”

Keearn More, Read the Complete Post via UC Berkeley Library or Internet Archive.

Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Journal Articles, Libraries, News