Digital Ethics
Some projects in the digital humanities count as research on human subjects as defined by federal law (45 CFR 46). There are two issues here.
Does your project count as research, defined by federal law as systematic research designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge?
And If your project does count as research, as defined by federal law, does it count as research on human subjects? This might seem like an obvious matter, but it isn't. For guidance in determining whether your project counts as human subject research requiring IRB review, see the following Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) decision charts.
If your digital humanities project does count as human subject research, you will likely need to complete the relevant Citi Training for your discipline, and you will need to submit your project application to Arkansas State University's IRB via Cayuse IRB.
Problematic 3D representations:
Molyneaux declares "The reinforcement of ideas in some images is very powerful...Pictures and other visual representations...have a tremendous inertia, or staying power, that might persist long after the ideas behind the images have gone out of fashion." And this is likely true to an even greater extent of 3D representations. This suggests that creators of 3D representations ought to consider with great care their choices in designing and executing such representations, for potential negative effects of missteps are amplified when one is working with 3D representations. Here we focus on the potential for missteps in creating 3D virtual representations of environments and also in creating the occupants of such environments (avatars and indigenous occupants of such environments ("bots"). Likely, the points we make below can be extended to other sorts of 3D representations as well (for instance, 3D representations of artifacts, or of buildings), but we do not develop this extension here.
3D representations of environments: lessons from a trolley problem experiment:
Philosophers, social scientists, and communications scholars often generate data by posing what are called "thought experiments" to their audience (a scenario which a subject is asked to imagine and respond to). These experiments are almost always presented linguistically, through text or spoken language. This allows the presenter of the thought experiment to leave many details of the scenario unrepresented. However, might these unrepresented details matter? It appears as though the unrepresented details of thought experiments may affect the intuitions of the recipient of the thought experiment.
In the traditional presentation of the trolley problem, you are asked to imagine yourself standing at the pictured switch, and to consider whether you would let the trolley continue on its track to run over the five individuals on the left track, or divert the trolley to run over one individual by pulling the switch; sketch of the trolley problem. Preliminary results from an implementation of the trolley problem in a 3D virtual environment suggest that how one concretizes or fixes previously unrepresented details can influence the judgments and decisions of the participant.
One consequence or takeaway for DH researchers in general, and for DH researchers working in 3D or 2D in particular, is that how one fills in the details of a representation may have unintended effects. This is a special challenge for DH because 3D and 2D environments typically force a researcher to "fill in details" (when representing a scenario with language naturally allows for ambiguity).
3D representations of avatars and autonomous computational occupants of virtual environments (bots): lessons from a sampling of past efforts:
If constructing 3D virtual environments offers opportunities for 3D content creators to generate unanticipated and potentially negative effects, then surely populating such environments offers even more such opportunities. Populating 3D virtual environments is important in general because most of the spaces we are interested in representing contain people, which implies that adequately representing spaces frequently requires adequately representing people. When creators of 3D virtual environments seek immersion as a goal, choices about how to construct avatars are particularly important, as the experience of moving around a space (physical or virtual) is intimately connected to having a body (physical or virtual!). But the dangers of populating 3D virtual environments with avatars and/or computational autonomous agents (a.k.a., bots) are legion, ranging from relatively minor dangers like jarring explorers out of immersion in an 3D virtual environment to more significant dangers like deeply offending people or buttressing past social inequalities and injustices.
Here's an example of an avatar choice selection likely to jar people out of becoming immersed in the 3D reconstruction of Arkansas State's historical Lakeport Plantation property (Lakeport Plantation shown in the background; image courtesy of Alyson Gill).
The avatars at the Lakeport Plantation slide was created to make a point, but we can find jarring instances of avatars occupying actual 3D immersive environments. For a time, Edward Gonzalez-Tennant maintained a virtual museum of the town of Rosewood, Florida in the MUVE Second Life. The mostly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, was destroyed by a mob of angry whites in early January, 1923. Six African-American residents of Rosewood were brutally killed during what is now called the Rosewood Massacre and the and virtually the entire town put to the torch. Follow the link provided and scroll down the page to view a still image of a crowd of avatars visiting Gonzalez-Tennant's Second Life Virtual Rosewood Museum.
Another instance of an avatar that is potentially jarring in a different way occurs in Emily Roxworthy's 2013 interactive 3D model of a Japanese-American internment camp once located in Jerome, Arkansas, Drama in the Delta. Players in the game assume the role (and guise) of Jane, a 14 year-old Japanese-American girl confined a the camp. The Jane avatar underwent a number of revisions, in response to various criticisms. Please follow this link to view a later iteration of the Jane avatar (and see if you can tell what some of the fuss might have been about.)
There are digital humanities projects that have taken considerable care in the design and deployment of avatars. One example is the Digital Hadrian's Villa Project, directed by Bernie Frischer of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory at Indiana University. In the 3D interactive Unity version of the villa, those wishing to explore the villa are presented with a curated set of avatar options representing the various sorts of people one might have found in the villa in its heyday: slave, courtier, freeman, scholar, soldier, senator, even emperor. The different avatars are dressed differently (according to the best scholarly reconstructions), but more interestingly, they have differential access to different areas of the villa (corresponding to rank). By thinking about this system, we can perhaps get a sense for how avatar design and deployment might be a force for good, not just by conveying historically accurate representations but also by giving those animating these avatars a first-person sense for what it might be like to inhabit various social roles with which they might have little experience, that of slave, for instance. Above is a screenshot of the avatar choices in the Unity version of the Digital Hadrian's Villa Project, image uploaded from idialab.org.
Group activity:
Pair up with another member of our institute. Choose one of your DH projects. Think about the implementation of the project you have chosen, and discuss the most prominent moral challenges you see as being involved in this implementation.
Alternatively (if neither of your projects is well-suited for this), view an episode of the web series Ask a Slave (your choice of which episode). Imagine you are charged with translating this episode into a 3D virtual interactive environment, complete with avatars (and possibly autonomous computational agents, a.k.a., bots). Discuss the most prominent moral challenges you see as being involved in doing so.
Capturing and making available paradata in 3D models:
Most humanities scholars are intimately familiar with best practices for making data about how they reach and support their claims (loosely, paradata) available to consumers of their scholarly analogue projects. Indeed, it is probably not possible to legitimately earn a terminal degree in the humanities without mastering the intricacies of appropriately citing primary and secondary sources, documenting the kinds of evidence that support various claims, and grading claims in terms of how well- or ill- supported they are. We manifestly have a moral obligation to engage in appropriate citation, documentation, and grading of claims, so as to avoid engaging in various forms of academic dishonesty. And this obligation binds us in the conduct of our digital projects as much as our analogue ones.
Citing claims and documenting evidence within 3D models:
It is, however, far from obvious how to cite claims and document evidence in constructing 3D digital environments and artifacts. Embedding footnote numbers all over the place would be distracting, sacrificing the very sort of immersion which at least some content creators seek to achieve in their projects. And where to put the actual footnotes, in any case?
Such questions are evolving as the technology for creating and curating digital objects and environments evolve. But we can get a sense for how one might answer it by considering one well-developed system for representing paradata in a 3D virtual environment, the one included within VSim, developed by the Institute for Digital Research and Education at UCLA. VSim is a free platform (developed using a NEH DH Start-Up Grant) that enables users to interact with 3D models (objects or environments), create linear presentations within 3D models, and embed resources (including paradata) in 3D models. To get a general sense for VSim, have a look at VSim_The Movie. Of particular interest to us is the discussion of VSim's capabilities for embedding paradata (by authors) and displaying it (to users) paradata, which starts at about 5.5 minutes into into this approximately 12 minute clip. Here is a screen shot of VSim's author interface for embedding resources. And here is a screenshot of VSim's user interface for viewing embedded resources. There are multiple alternatives to VSim for representing paradata within 3D models, but consideration of how VSim works should give you a broad sense of available strategies for discharging authorial responsibilities to accessibly cite sources and document evidence while working with 3D models.
Representng degrees of confidence and uncertainty within 3D models:
Necessarily, in creating a digital object or 3D digital environment representing a real object or environment about which not everything is known, gaps will have to be filled in. The ruins of a building on Delos (Greece) might suggest that it had a roof, for instance. But various questions remain more or less wide open, like the height of the roof, the interface to the roof, the support structure for the roof, the roof type, and so on. A navigable 3D reconstruction of this building will have to fill in all of these gaps, and the parts of the building that are conjectured will tend to look just like parts of the building that are known with certainty or hypothesized with great confidence. But as noted earlier, as academics, we have a responsibility to grade the confidence or uncertainty of the claims we make in constructing 3D models.
Responses to the challenge of how we might go about representing degrees of confidence and uncertainty in elements of 3D models are much less well-developed than responses to the challenge of capturing and representing paradata. One option (employed by the Digital Hadrian's Villa Project discussed earlier) is just to include all of the paradata for the project on a companion website. But I suspect that such information is even less likely to be perused than the endnotes in an academic book, because correlating the elements of a 3D model with information on a companion website is apt to take considerable effort. Another option would be to just gray out portions of 3D models in which the designer has little confidence. But this approach would likely militate against the immersiveness of the model involved, and it would not do well at representing alternative hypotheses about uncertain elements of models.
For a third option that may avoid the drawbacks of the two options just mentioned, we return to VSim. So far as I am aware, VSim does not explicitly include a mechanism for grading the confidence or uncertainly that designers have in the various elements of the 3D models they manipulate within VSim. But one project made accessible within VSim, Digital Karnak (directed by Elaine Sullivan while she was at UCLA's Institute for Digital Research and Education, includes an feature that could be adapted to to register either degrees of confidence in the elements of a 3D model or even to register an array of alternative hypotheses about such elements. The feature in question is a "time slider" used to show how the actual archaeological site at Carnac looked at different times. For a look at this time slider, follow this link to a talk by Elaine on Digital Karnak; discussion of the time slider occurs from about 18.5 minutes into this approximately 1 hour and 12 minute clip. It would be fairly straightforward to repurpose something like Digital Karnak's time slider into a slider that represented different hypotheses about elements of 3D model. And by assigning something like confidence values to the elements of a 3D model, one could alternatively repurpose this time slider into a "confidence slider," with one end of the slider showing only parts of the model with high confidence values. Moving the slider towards the other end might progressively overlay the high confidence value elements of the model with more speculative elements.
There are other options than this for representing degrees of confidence and uncertainty within digital 3D models, but consideration of the above should get you started in thinking about how to do this within your own projects.
Sustainability: Preserving 3D digital environments and digital artifacts:
Most of us probably aren't used to thinking about this, but all publications have an expected shelf life. A properly cared-for hardback book will probably outlast its author, perhaps even its author's grandchildren, but at some point it will molder into dust. 3D digital environments and artifacts have lifespans better measured not in generations, but in short spans of years, even months. This means that without great care on the part of digital content creators, their creations are at high risk of disappearing from view entirely. This obviously raises prudential worries, who wants to pour months or years of time and energy into a project that will disappear from everyone's view within months or years? But in cases where projects are funded by grants, or supported by release time by a home institution, or even just potentially significant, the potentially short shelf life of digital projects raises moral worries as well. If one has a moral obligation (of whatever sort) to make one's digital project accessible, then it bears thinking about strategies for preserving 3D digital environments and artifacts.
Here is is worth noting that many of the 3D projects we have mentioned above have become relatively or entirely inaccessible. We referenced Arkansas State University's 3D interaction reconstruction of the Lakeport Plantation in Second Life. It is now entirely offline (and it is only one of a number of ASTATE heritage reconstructions that are now entirely offline). The Virtual Rosewood Museum in Second Life is similarly offline. The website hosting Drama in the Delta, mentioned above, is still live, but you cannot readily enter the 3D environment, because it was constructed to run on a version of the Torque game engine that is now unsupported on most current platforms. The Digital Hadrian's Villa Project, also mentioned above, is still navigable. But since it was built in a dated version of the Unity game engine, there is not much you can do or see there. I could go on, for the number of inaccessible 3D models created in even the last decade is large, indeed.
But reflection on the differing natures of digital projects suggests that this might not be as great a tragedy as it might initially appear. For probably not all DH projects should be preserved into the indefinite future. So for any given DH project, perhaps the first question to ask when it comes to sustainability is "for how long should this project continue to be accessible?"
In general, there is a tradeoff between being on the cutting edge of technology and lastingness. If you published your project 15 years ago using .txt files and .jpg images, it would still be fully available today. But it obviously wouldn't be very flashy or interactive. So once you determine how long a DH project should last (ideally), the next step is to think about how much you are willing to trade sustainability off against goals for your project that can only be accomplished using technology more advanced that .txt or .jpg files, and how far you are willing to push the technology envelope.
For any given project, there is unlikely to be an obvious optimal tradeoff between sustainability and technological innovation. But once you make a choice here, and commit yourself, it is worth thinking about deploying a backup option or options. Most of the DH projects mentioned above (for instance, the Virtual Rosewood Museum, Drama in the Delta, the Digital Hadrian's Villa Project) are still being discussed today only because they employed multiple deployment options.
Group activity:
Pair up with the same institute member with whom you paired up earlier, and focus on the same DH project upon which you focused earlier (either one of your DH projects or the imaginary DH project that you created around an episode of Ask a Slave). Think about how long this project ought to continue to be accessible, and come up with a strategy for making it accessible over the shelf life you have identified for it.
