Scott Dexter, Professor of Computer Science, Brooklyn College
Erin Glass, Regina Mundi
Evan Misshula, Manager of the Tech Talent Pipeline, Queens College
The digital humanities rely, fundamentally, on software. And while digital humanists can be very explicit about the ethical positions embedded in their scholarship, pedagogy, and other academic labor, the software we use can appear to be completely orthogonal–neutral, if not simply irrelevant–to these concerns.
Of course, some DHers do make software choices based on ethical considerations–for example, perceiving and acting on a direct connection between a felt scholarly imperative for sharing. They may go to great effort to use or create open-source software. Yet we believe there is a pressing need to move this kind of ethical deliberation from the narrow (neoliberal, popsicle) scope of individual choice to a broader discussion of software ethics within the digital humanities community.
So, in this piece, we intend to offer both tools and controversial positions:
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a primer on software ethics, especially the implications of “free software,” “open-source” software, and proprietary software
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an “environmental scan” of common DH software practices
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some recommendations for scholars who wish to make more ethically-informed software choices, including an on-ramp for scholars and institutions who are more comfortable with incremental, rather than wholesale, change
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a call for DH funders to be explicit about software ethics in their RFPs
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a vision which others may wish to contest for a digital humanities, and an academy, which is fully conscious of the ethical implications of the software it both produces and relies on.
A significant stream of digital humanities discourse stakes out an array of ethical positions (which we fully endorse) relating to the practice of digital humanities within and beyond the academy: we need to be more transparent about the labor practices and economies of reputation undergirding our work; we need to communicate more effective with the general public and with scholars in other disciplines, in order to address pressing societal problems in new/anced ways. We need to share our tools—our code, our data—with others, in order both to support the reproducibility of our results and to allow our community to stand on each other’s shoulders. We need to transform the increasingly corporate academy.
For example, many times free software is used for analysis but data is not shared which prevents confirmarory analysis or challenge.