Dear all,
In August 2022, the UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text and data mining (TDM).
The project, entitled Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross-Border (“LLTDM-X”), supported research and analysis to address law and policy issues faced by U.S. digital humanities practitioners whose text data mining research and practice intersects with foreign-held or -licensed content, or involves international research collaborations. Information in this email is culled from their blog post announcement ( https://buildinglltdm.org/2023/10/02/wrapping-up-our-neh-funded-project-to-h... )
In early 2023, we hosted a series of three online round tables with U.S.-based cross-border TDM practitioners and law and ethics experts from six countries.
The round table conversations were structured to illustrate the empirical issues that researchers face, and also for the practitioners to benefit from preliminary advice on legal and ethical challenges. Upon the completion of the round tables, the LLTDM-X project team created a hypothetical case study that (i) reflects the observed cross-border LLTDM issues and (ii) contains preliminary analysis to facilitate the development of future instructional materials.
We also charged the experts with providing responsive and tailored written feedback to the practitioners about how they might address specific cross-border issues relevant to each of their projects. This project lead to two significant outcomes:
*1: Case study* The Project Team developed a hypothetical case study reflective of “typical” cross-border LLTDM issues that U.S.-based practitioners encounter. The CASE STUDY https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KUK9HoNrLwEMcV_lNDKjxSnH3ipvhUWU2jbJj2g-hd8/edit#heading=h.db8vim2trm84 examines needs and concerns regarding cross-border copyright, contracts, and privacy & ethics variables across two distinct paradigms: first, a situation where U.S.-based researchers perform all TDM acts in the U.S., and second, a situation where U.S.-based researchers engage with collaborators abroad, or otherwise perform TDM acts in both U.S. and abroad. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KUK9HoNrLwEMcV_lNDKjxSnH3ipvhUWU2jbJj2g-hd8/edit#heading=h.afyajyzcbihm
*2: White paper *The project team developed a WHITE PAPER https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KR0sXEg3M2eJDV0ZvZDafv-6J2XY2lA9vF9GHYzmBMo/edit#heading=h.k1hnkb3wfomg providing a comprehensive description of the project, including origins and goals, contributors, activities, and outcomes. Of particular note are several project takeaways and recommendations, which they hope will help inform future research and action to support cross-border text data mining.
This is a particularly US-centric perspective on an important topic, but there was significant input from legal experts across the world, including:
- Andrew Charlesworth, University of Bristol (privacy) - Juan Carlos Fernández-Molina, Universidad de Granada (licensing) - Sean Fiil-Flynn, American University Washington College of Law (copyright) - Lucie Guibault Dalhousie University (copyright, licensing) - Heidi McKee, Miami University of Ohio (ethics) - Argyri Panezi, IE Law School & Stanford University (privacy) - James Porter, Miami University of Ohio (ethics) - Matthew Sag, Emory University School of Law (copyright) - Ben White, Bournemouth University (copyright) - Fernando Esteban de la Rosa, Universidad de Granada (licensing) - João Quintais, University of Amsterdam (copyright) - Ryan Calo, University of Washington (privacy)
While I understand this may not be of interest to all on the corpora-list, I do hope this can provide some useful starting points for those of us worried and/or stymied by the copyright question in their research, especially for those of us with collaborators or research interests that exist beyond the USA.
Thank you, Heather Froehlich
-- Dr Heather Froehlich
w // http://hfroehli.ch t // @heatherfro