Written by Heather Wacha
Documenting DH is a project from the Digital Humanities Research Network (DHRN). It consists of a series of audio interviews with various humanities scholars and students around the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Each interviewee is given a chance to talk about how they view data, work with data, manage data, or teach data to others. Most recently, we interviewed Alan Rubel, an assistant professor in the iSchool and Legal Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an affiliate of the UW Law School. His research focuses on privacy issues that arise in specific data collection and management practices, as well as the ethical dimension of digital humanities projects as a whole. His interview is now accessible on the DHRN website.
How do you manage the data you work with?
Rubel’s data mainly comes from licenses for electronic resources in higher education libraries, i.e. the legal contracts that libraries make with publishers and other parties concerning the use of electronic resources. The licenses themselves can deal with any or all issues of privacy protection, rights for sharing information, when to close down IP addresses, when to give or deny third-party access to information, etc. Rubel quite simply marks up physical licenses and scoring sheets, and enters his data into spreadsheets for later analysis.
In a recent project he conducted with a Ph.D. student, the two looked at data analytics in higher education institutions, both the data that students provided before they arrived at a given university, as well as the data collected during a student’s time at the institution and afterwards. By analyzing this data, Rubel and his doctoral student found that the use of the data was principally geared towards educational outcomes. So things like data collected from content-management programs, location information or from web browsers can help an educational institution make predictions and decisions for advising, retention, etc.
What Rubel and his student found most interesting is that not all the information collected from students is geared towards educational outcomes. Universities often gather information on a let’s-gather-now basis in order to have information that may prove valuable later. Rubel and his doctoral student propose that not every inference or piece of information gathered from students should be fair game, even if potentially relevant to learning outcomes, and this is where ethics comes in. What should and shouldn’t be fair game to enrich a student’s learning outcomes? Moreover, these practices make us reconsider the reasons for higher education. Many posit that a university education should help a student develop values and live through those values as she/he sees fit. If so, then the degree to which a university is using student data collection to guide students could conflict with encouraging students to develop autonomy.
What do you find most interesting and exciting about working with data?
Rubel confesses that he thinks his data is incredibly boring. “It doesn’t raise a lot of humanities subjects concerns. It’s not esoteric. It’s not hard to come by.” Yet, in a way, this is exactly what fascinates Rubel. The legal contracts he reads are everyday documents that mark and define relationships between universities and publishers. These documents are a key part of the process and help both parties perform their jobs. Yes, contracts and licenses can be a hard read, but it’s important – as with any contract – to try to understand what is really going on and what is happening. In other words, Rubel likes to look beyond the legalese for the kinds of cultural or institutional values that these documents instantiate.
The language and structure of legal contracts can protect people’s access to intellectual property. They can place limitations on what people can do with information. They can carve out rights in places where rights had not previously been articulated. They can protect patron data for better or worse. For example, this was tested in the case of Aaron Swarz, a research fellow at Harvard who, wanting to download articles from MIT, used his personal computer and wrote script to download hundreds of articles from JSTOR. However, JSTOR had the ability, as per the licensing agreement they had negotiated, to shut down parts of JSTOR. This decision was based not on the violation of a criminal law, but on the violation of contract agreement. Swarz was found criminally liable because he used his computer to access something worth more than $5000.00. He exceeded his authorized access on the basis of a definition in the licensing contract.
If you are interested in hearing more, go to Alan Rubel’s interview on the DHRN webpage. In the end, the seemingly banal licenses and contracts that Rubel works with can bring about transformations and consequences that are anything but banal.