Pervasive Data Ethics

The project’s website is pervade.umd.edu

Katie Shilton, myself, and five other colleagues at other institutions were awarded a NSF Large grant (“CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research) in summer 2017. The four-year project promotes promotes the progress of science and technology development by providing the empirical knowledge needed to advance fair, just computational research. For the official NSF award, click here.

Prior Work: Attitudes & Behaviors Toward Social Computing Ethics

With the increasing popularity of mediated communication and the relatively easy access  to large collections of user data, social computing, HCI, and other researchers face new challenges to ensuring the data they collect and analyze is done so ethically.

Katie Shilton, Jessica Vitak, and Zahra Ashktorab collected survey data from (1) researchers in academia and industry who work with online digital traces and (2) IRBs at research institutions in the U.S. to understand the attitudes toward and practices employed when collecting online data and to identify disconnects between researchers and IRBs regarding best ethical practices.

The first paper from this data collection was published at CSCW 2016 and can be accessed here. The second paper was recently accepted by the Journal of Research Ethics and will be posted once published.