Scott Dexter Erin Glass Evan Misshula
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.
Digital humanities also relies, fundamentally, on software. And while digital humanists are often quite explicit about their ethical stance, software can seem ethically neutral or irrelevant. Many DHers, for example, use open-source software as a matter of principle, in support of the ethical imperatives for sharing and transparency. But the DH community doesn’t tend to be super reflective about the ethics of the software it uses. 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 bring their software practices more in line with the broader ethical positions we describe above
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a call for DH funders to be explicit about software ethics in their RFPs
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a vision (and this is the debate-able bit) for a digital humanities, and an academy, which is fully conscious of the ethical implications of the software it both produces and relies on.