Chris Alen Sula

Adapting to Digital Environments: Evolutionary Ethics and the Challenge of Privacy

chrisalensula — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:28:13 +0000

Accepted for Information Ethics Roundtable 2012
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
April 27–28, 2012
ABSTRACT In addressing questions of information privacy in the twenty-first century, many theorists and policymakers have turned to the pre-digital era to examine legal, political, and philosophical foundations of privacy, generally speaking. This paper considers even more distant foundations of information privacy from the perspective of evolutionary ethics. Recent work in evolutionary psychology presents the following puzzle: many believe that natural selected favored altruism in the course of human evolution, yet our ancestors’ environment is so different from our own that any altruistic instincts we have inherited may provide a poor foundation for ethical behavior in the present. The case is doubtless more complicated in digital environments, which are even more remote than the merely physical ones of our ancestors. In this paper, I examine the continuities and discontinuities between the early adaptive environment (25,000–75,000 years ago) and current digital environments as they relate to personal information and social interaction. This analysis centers on the presence and size of communities in each type of environment, the roles of social monitoring and punishment, practices and expectations of reciprocity, the presence of egalitarianism, and so-called behavioral contagion. With this empirical framework in place, I then assess the prospects for privacy in present and future digital environments. In particular, I contrast the case of social networks (which in many ways mirror small groups in the early adaptive environment), with large-scale data warehouses (which represent a considerable departure from that environment). This analysis highlights special areas of ethical concern in which human instincts alone (however optimistically assessed) are unlikely to produce ethical behavior. I conclude by reflecting on the challenges for our species as we enter these new, digital environments.

vizualize.me

chrisalensula — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:40:51 +0000

LIS Jobs & Internships

chrisalensula — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:28:38 +0000

LIS 653 Knowledge Organization

chrisalensula — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:42:57 +0000

This is an introductory course to key concepts, systems, and tools to organize, provide access to, and share information resources. The course covers basic principles and applications of descriptive cataloging, classification, and indexing for physical and electronic resources. Also covered are metadata, thesauri, and emerging knowledge organization systems including ontologies and folksonomies. The course provides the foundation for further studies in library, archives, and museum cataloging; reference; information retrieval; database management; and information architecture.

Assignments

Participation (5%)
Metadata presentation (15%)
Short exercises (30%)
Catalog analysis (25%)
Categorization design (25%)

Topics

Foundations of Information Organization
1. Course Introduction
2. History of Information Organization
3. Theoretical Frameworks for Information Organization

Cataloging and Metadata
4. Principles of Cataloging
5. Metadata I: Models
6. Metadata II: Description
7. Metadata III: Control

Categorization
8. Categorization Schemes
9. Subject Classification and Vocabulary Control
10. Social Organization/Folksononomies
11. Ontologies
12. Abstracting and Indexing

Related Developments
13. Information Architecture
14. Knowledge Organization and Information Visualization

LIS 697 Digital Humanities

chrisalensula — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:45:21 +0000

This course examines the history, theory, and practice of digital humanities, paying special attention to the ways in which digital humanities are transforming research, disciplines, and even the academy itself. Topics include contrasts and continuities between traditional and digital humanities; tools and techniques used by digital humanists; the processes of planning, funding, managing, and evaluating digital humanities projects; ways in which digital humanities impacts scholarly communication and higher education; and the special roles of libraries and information professionals in this growing movement.

Digital Humanities Course Flyer (Spring 2012)
Digital Humanities Syllabus (Spring 2012)

Assignments

Participation (5%)
Presentation on digital humanities in the disciplines (20%)
Methods exercises (20%)
Management exercises (15%)
Final project (40%)

working on a long-term digital humanities project (accompanied by critical reflections on that work);
doing a small digital humanities project (accompanied by critical reflections on that work);
proposing a digital humanities project (ideally in the form of a grant proposal), with reference to plan steps, evaluation, and preservation; OR
writing a research paper that reflects on the theory, methodology, or impact of the digital humanities.

Topics

Introduction
1. Course Introduction
2. Defining the Digital Humanities
3. Digital Humanities in the Discplines

Methodologies
4. Digital Annotation and Collective Authorship
5. Textual Analysis
6. Mapping and Geohumanities
7. Network Analysis

Project Management and Cultural Heritage
8. Design and Planning
9. Funding and Evaluation
10. Preservation and Infrastructure

Impact
11. Teaching and Learning
12. Scholarly Communication, Research, and Higher Education
13. Libraries, Museums, and Public Humanities

Bibliographic Foundations

chrisalensula — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:29:52 +0000

Authority, Access, and the Archive

chrisalensula — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:11:14 +0000

Accepted for the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies
The Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State Campus
State College, Pennsylvania
October 20-23, 2011

ABSTRACT: Suppose we imagine an archivist who has managed to collect all the individual pieces of knowledge ever available and preserve them in some common or useful form. Suppose further that our archivist wants to make this information as widely available as possible. Even setting aside real problems of literacy, disability, language, and the like, a key question will still remain: how to arrange this information to facilitate the public’s access to it? This paper surveys three different models for arranging the archive (expert/authoritative curation, crowdsourcing, and computational methods), noting the theoretical and practical implications of each. I argue that the authority model, still largely in use today, has some advantages but is also likely to reproduce biased and oppressive attitudes of the authorities or their historical situation, which reflects longstanding concerns about power and control present in utopian and dystopian thought. Following that, I examine the crowdsourcing model as an instance of digital utopia, which holds exciting possibilities for reimagining (and reorganizing) the archive. At the same time, I argue, there is real concern that crowds could agree on inaccurate or harmful beliefs, making this model potentially unsuitable for arranging the archive. I conclude by describing some advantages of computational methods, provided that those methods incorporate elements of the first two models. This hybrid position blends technology and individual participation in a way that surmounts some traditional concerns present in utopian imaginings.

The Demography of Philosophy

chrisalensula — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:36:39 +0000

Demographers study the structure, interactions, and shifting trends of human populations. To date, artificial and opt-in populations have received little attention. This work applies demographic methods to the field of philosophy to understand its past, current, and future directions. For example, consider this adapted population graph showing North American philosophy PhDs in the period 1905–2005.

Population graphs show the overall structure of a population based on age group (i.e., birth year cohort); male and female figures are often shown separately, since sex has important implications for other demographic trends involving birth rate, education, health, and so on. Population graphs often highlight the growth and age structure of the population, as well as changes in female and male birth rate and mortality.

For the purpose of studying philosophy, this standard population graph was adapted in several ways. Although individuals enter a population through birth or immigration, entry into academic disciplines is best characterized by completing a doctoral degree in the field. Thus, the year in which a person’s doctoral degree was awarded was used as a proxy for his/her birth year in the field.[1] (In this graph, there is no correlate for exit because many actual years of death are unknown and, even if they were, it is likely the individuals exit the field through retirement or unemployment years or decades before they die.) As a result, the graph is not a true population graph because it does not show any existent population over a single period of time, but rather several continuous populations within the period indicated. Nevertheless, the chart captures overall trends of growth and decline and gives a sense of the age and gender of the current population.

[1] Data on doctoral degrees was compiled from dissertations housed in libraries at 17 North American institutions, as well as records contained in Dissertation Abstracts International, Thomas Bechtle’s Dissertations in Philosophy Accepted at American Universities, 1861-1975, and annual lists of doctoral degrees printed in the Review of Metaphysics. Sex was imputed to degree recipients based on first and middle names, as well as additional research about specific individuals. Of the original 14,926 degree recipients, the sex of 911 (6.1%) could not be determined, and these were excluded from the visualization

Compatible Database Initiative

chrisalensula — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:58:26 +0000

This 2011 NEH Digital Start-Up Grant explores best practices in database architecture and visualization for use among professional organizations in the humanities and scholarly associations. Grant activities include workshops and the development of a consortium to generate standards for shared, interoperable data sets for humanities-based network analysis projects.

For recent updates, see http://compdb.blogspot.com.

Phylo

chrisalensula — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:53:30 +0000

Phylo combines data sources, user feedback, and visual analytics to advance the study of the discipline of philosophy. Our work traces the flow of ideas across time by documenting the people, places, and institutions associated with philosophy. As a service to the philosophical community, Phylo also provides free information on professional opportunities and activities, including job listings, placement records (coming soon), and conference announcements (coming soon).

Phylo was created by David Morrow and Chris Alen Sula in 2006 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Phylo is currently a project of DigitalHumanities @ SILS, an initiative of the School of Information & Library Science at Pratt Institute. Phylo has received supported from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and the New Media Lab.

For more information, visit http://phylo.info.