The Ethics of Structured Information
Download as PPTX, PDF1 like185 views
1. Every decision made about information is a filter that shapes reality. When classifying or structuring information, professionals are asserting power over what information is organized and how. 2. No information filter is neutral - they all reflect biases and choices about what to include or exclude. Indigenous communities have suffered from biased filters in colonial archives, so tools like Mukurtu are being developed through community partnerships. 3. Professionals have a responsibility over the power of information filters and must ensure biases are not amplified to disempower groups. While machines can help, humans cannot outsource accountability for information outcomes and consequences.
The Ethics of Structured Information
- 1. The Ethics of Structured Information Taxonomy Bootcamp Nick Poole, Chief Executive, CILIP 16 October 2019
- 2. The truth is that we are neither online nor offline but onlife, that is, we increasingly live in that special space that is both analog and digital, both online and offline. An analogy may help. Imagine someone asking whether the water is sweet or salty in the estuary where the river meets the sea. That someone has not understood the special nature of the place. The consequences of such radical transformation are many, but one is particularly significant and rich in consequences: what is the human project we should pursue in designing the mangrove society?
- 3. We can’t trust the platforms We can’t surrender the ‘human project’ Floridi describes to the platforms, not because they are corporate entities, but because their mission is dangerously lop- sided and their power is disproportionate to their viability. If you regard human choice as inefficient, and you focus your technological might on removing inefficiency from the system, eventually you undermine democratic agency and - ultimately – free will. That’s a lot to ask in return for some cat videos.
- 4. Why ‘ethics’….? To reach for ethical distinctions and to seek to categorise experiences and objects are two fundamentals of the human condition – any ‘human project’ to design a future in which people move seamlessly between contexts must account for both. Any professional community must have at its heart a commonly-expressed set of ethical principles, norms or values. It is the values and ethics of a profession that distinguish it more explicitly than their skills. • Meta-ethics – exploring the origin and meaning of ethical principles • Normative ethics – exploring moral judgements & the criteria for “right” and “wrong” • Applied ethics – the application of ethical principles to human activity
- 5. When we're dealing with structured information I think we are asking a combination of questions about normative and applied ethics - what are we doing when we selectively filter information, structure and organise it and make it available for re-use? Are we doing it in good or in bad faith? Do we know whether the results are right or wrong, good or bad? Do we even think about this or are we too busy to care? By what right do we go about the business of structuring and organising information and do we know whether what we are doing is empowering or disempowering others. How do we ensure that ‘ethics’ isn’t just another frame which legitimises dominant groups at the expense of disempowering others? Do we need a new frame of reference which is less about the cataloguer applying models and solutions and more about empowering the information user?
- 7. 1. The world is made of information
- 8. 1. The world is made of information 2. Every decision we make about information is a filter
- 9. 1. The world is made of information 2. Every decision we make about information is a filter 3. No filter is neutral
- 10. 1. The world is made of information 2. Every decision we make about information is a filter 3. No filter is neutral
- 11. Rebuilding Notre Dame from 50bn data points Following the devastating fire in ‘The Forest’ of Notre Dame de Paris, French 3D Modelling company AGP were asked to assemble a digital reconstruction based on 50bn data points acquired through lasergrammetry and photogrammetry. The model isn’t just an image, though – it’s a BIM (Building Information Modelling) dataset which combines point-cloud scans with integrated information for each architectural element, including materials, date of construction etc. Engineers and builders will use the dataset to re- create the original fabric of the building from information captured in 2016.
- 12. Justice for Grenfell An international collaboration through Forensic Architecture are using a combination of media archiving, data analytics and building information model to create a realtime reconstruction of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower. Similar projects are crowdsourcing information assets to seek justice, clarification or closure relating to a whole range of human events, from political assassinations to illegal detentions and chemical warfare. www.forensic-architecture.org
- 13. It from Bit But here's how physicist Paul Davies, director of BEYOND: The Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, frames the question: "Historically, matter has been at the bottom of the explanatory chain, and information has been a sort of secondary derivative of it," Davies said. Now, he added, "there's increasing interest among at least a small group of physicists to turn this upside down and say, maybe at rock bottom, the universe is about information and information processing, and it's matter that emerges as a secondary concept.“ In this view, the growth of data and information isn’t a growth in the application of data to the material world, it is a gradual discovery of the data and information that are inherent in the material world. We aren’t creating complexity, we’re gradually revealing it.
- 14. Let’s be unafraid of the future A lot of the concern about AI, machine learning and data analytics is predicated on the idea that we’re standing, passive and still, while these technologies are hurtling towards us. But we’re not standing still. Every day, we’re adapting, learning, testing boundaries, establishing norms, exploring possibilities. We’re in the earliest days of an impossible revolution in our capability and agency as human beings – there is nothing in our history to suggest we cannot adapt and encompass. As information professionals, we have a new job to do – ensuring that the future is human-centred. Copyright @Askkell 2019
- 15. When we classify, organise or structure information, it isn’t something abstracted from reality – we are organising reality. In practice, this is an assertion of power. (No pressure…)
- 16. 1. The world is made of information 2. Every decision we make about information is a filter 3. No filter is neutral
- 17. There are no ‘clean’ collections Collecting is synonymous with the exercise of power. It is always asymmetric – there is the collector and the collected. Someone has made a conscious choice about what to collect and what to leave behind. The past 20 years have seen a profound shift, from ‘selfish’ institutions whose success is measured in terms of what they own or contain to ‘generous’ ones whose success is measured in what they share, release or empower. Where is your institution in this?
- 18. Rediscovering indigenous knowledge protocols Mukurtu is a content management system and digital archiving tool built for and in ongoing dialogue with indigenous communities. “The colonial collecting mission has left a living legacy of cultural materials that are displaced from their home communities and often-times contain wrong, misleading, derogatory, or offensive metadata, that gets continually and endlessly circulated once those collections are digitized, put online, and then scraped up by aggregators.” Kimberley Christen Director, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation Washington State University
- 19. Rediscovering indigenous knowledge protocols Mukurtu is a content management system and digital archiving tool built for and in ongoing dialogue with indigenous communities. “The colonial collecting mission has left a living legacy of cultural materials that are displaced from their home communities and often-times contain wrong, misleading, derogatory, or offensive metadata, that gets continually and endlessly circulated once those collections are digitized, put online, and then scraped up by aggregators.” Kimberley Christen Director, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation Washington State University
- 20. Rediscovering indigenous knowledge protocols Mukurtu is a content management system and digital archiving tool built for and in ongoing dialogue with indigenous communities. “The colonial collecting mission has left a living legacy of cultural materials that are displaced from their home communities and often-times contain wrong, misleading, derogatory, or offensive metadata, that gets continually and endlessly circulated once those collections are digitized, put online, and then scraped up by aggregators.” Kimberley Christen Director, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation Washington State University
- 21. Rediscovering indigenous knowledge protocols Mukurtu is a content management system and digital archiving tool built for and in ongoing dialogue with indigenous communities. “The colonial collecting mission has left a living legacy of cultural materials that are displaced from their home communities and often-times contain wrong, misleading, derogatory, or offensive metadata, that gets continually and endlessly circulated once those collections are digitized, put online, and then scraped up by aggregators.” Kimberley Christen Director, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation Washington State University
- 22. We may outsource the labour, but we can’t outsource accountability It is not algorithms per se that are racist, misogynist, prejudicial or inherently biased towards punishing the poor – that happens as a product of bad data modelling, bad selection of datasets, bad configuration, bad oversight of the outcomes and a lack of foresight in understanding that data is a mirror to and amplification of the biases inherent in ourselves. We can hand the computational heavy-lifting to the machines, but we can’t hand them accountability for the outcomes and consequences – that rests always with us. This is data citizenship.
- 23. The ‘human project’ is a process of selection… We filter things when we: • Collect them • Document them • Describe them • Classify them • Add them to systems • Digitise them • Share them • License them • Preserve them • Deaccession or delete them • Forget them
- 24. 1. The world is made of information 2. Every decision we make about information is a filter 3. No filter is neutral
- 25. As information professionals, we believe in the power of information to change lives for the better. We are motivated by the promotion and protection of intellectual freedom and freedom expression. This is a profoundly political worldview.
- 26. “The power to name is indeed a power. It is a vastly effectual power that those with privilege are always hard-pressed to cede.” “A lot’s in a name, Romeo”, April Hathcock, 2016
- 27. The problem with ‘knowledge organising systems’ Issues with the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are widely-documented – because any knowledge organising system represents an attempt to pin meaning and identity into a structure when they are inherently intersectional, chaotic and changeable. Efforts by critical cataloguers like Sandy Berman, Netanel Ganin, Jenna Freedman and April Hathcock to secure the inclusion of ‘white privilege’ in the LCSH demonstrate what happens when the outcomes of rules-based systems have profoundly political implications. Similar, the removal and subsequent re-inclusion of ‘illegal aliens’ demonstrates that no knowledge organising system that is owned by an institution is immune from political interference.
- 28. The “straight white American man” assumption Knowledge organising systems are – almost by definition – normative. They are ‘owned’ and hence will reflect the normative bias of their owner. In her talk at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in HE, Amanda Ros describes one example: “One example of bias is subjects containing the word “astronauts.” Women are designated with “Women astronauts” and “African American women astronauts,” but there is no subject heading for male astronauts. A book about astronauts who are men would have the general subject “Astronauts,” unless the racial identity prompted the use of a subject like “Hispanic American astronauts” or “Indian astronauts.” Likewise, a book about Russian astronauts would have a geographic subdivision added: “Astronauts – Soviet Union” instead of “Russian astronauts.” Without gender, race or geographic qualifications, “Astronauts” can be assumed to mean white American men in terms of library subjects."
- 29. A challenge from Queer Theory “Viewing knowledge organising systems from a queer perspective, however, challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be finally corrected. Engaging queer theory and library classification and cataloguing together requires new ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of marginal knowledge formations and identities who quite reasonably expect to be able to locate themselves in the library. Queer theory invites a shift in responsibility from cataloguers positioned to offer functional solutions, to public services librarians who can teach patrons to dialogically engage the catalogue as a complex and biased text, just as critical cataloguers do." - Emily Drabinski, Queering the Catalogue: Queer Theory and the politics of correction Should we stop trying to ‘fix’ the problem of complexity and identity as knowledge organisation questions with solutions and look instead to empower users to use catalogues critically?
- 31. Our experience is subjective, nothing is neutral. The best we can do as information professionals and technologists is to be self-aware, reflective, critical, transparent about our biases, willing to be accountable for them and open to learning & change.
- 32. There are some tools which can help us navigate the ‘mangrove society’ successfully
- 33. Professionalism Our sector is defined by a combination of continuity of values and purpose alongside perpetual change in the formats we manage, the services we deliver and the skills we need to do it. The new CILIP Ethical Framework is simplified, updated but essentially backwards-compatible with the foundations of librarianship & information science. http://www.cilip.org.uk/ethics
- 34. Openness Open standards, open content, open knowledge, open licenses – any filter we apply should be documented, reversible, verifiable, transparent and accountable (not just for today, but accountable to future cataloguers and users). Open standards and open knowledge are not a ‘magic bullet’ to solve the problem, but they are an essential part of being accountable for it. They also offer the model that is most compatible with the public task of our institutions. It is the combination of continuity of values and accountability which legitimises our position of trust in a digital society.
- 35. Information Literacy Information Literacy, defined as “The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society.” In thinking about promoting intellectual freedom and freedom of expression, and keeping people safe from online harms, education will always scale better than regulatory intervention or technical prevention. In Floridi’s ‘mangrove society’, in which activities are no longer bounded by format or place and are living ‘onlives’, information literacy is a survival skill. www.infolit.org.uk
- 36. Empathy Cataloguing is an act of empathy – with the item, with its context, meaning and purpose, with the creator, the potential user and the future cataloguer or librarian. Empathy – the ability to form a mental picture of the world as it appears to someone else and to seek to understand their experience of it – is the foundation of democracy, inclusion, tolerance and respect. When we are creating, selecting or applying a knowledge organising system, we have to be empathetic with the needs of future generations.
- 37. “What is the human project we should pursue in designing the mangrove society?” We have an ethical responsibility as information professionals to ensure that our design for the information society is predicated on universal empowerment. Because that’s what our profession is for.
- 38. In designing the future of our information-based society, we must be open, we must be bold, we must be fallible and we must be unafraid Nick Poole, CEO, CILIP www.cilip.org.uk/ethics @NickPoole1