Scott Dexter, Professor of Computer Science, Brooklyn College
Erin Glass, Digital Fellow and English doctoral student, CUNY Graduate Center
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, on one hand, a felt scholarly imperative for sharing and transparency, and, on the other, their use and creation of open-source software. At the same time, while freely available “Web 2.0” technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Docs offer educators exciting opportunities to foster energetic forms of student collaboration, these tools deprive students of rights over their data and foster a passive, consumer-oriented relationship toward technology.
How should we choose the technologies we use in our teaching and research? As we increasingly integrate digital technologies into our practice, we need a critical framework for analyzing the ethical and social implications of their use. That is, we must move this kind of ethical deliberation from the narrow scope of individual choice to a broader discussion of software ethics within the digital humanities community.
In this piece, we 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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recommendations for making 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 funders to be explicit about software ethics in their RFPs; and
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a vision for a digital humanities, and an academy, which is fully conscious of the ethical implications of the software it both produces and relies upon.