Human ethics challenges in digital community story-telling

Wednesday November 20th, 11:00am-11:25am @ Soundings Theatre

Understanding Place is a research project that seeks to explore the relationship between people and place in the Christchurch residential red zone, a 600-hectare area of severely quake-damaged land that once housed over 5000 residents. It sits between a participatory archive and a deep-mapping project, and is centred on the Red Zone Stories app, a tool that enables people to capture and share their stories about the red zone, to speak to things that are important to them at a community level, and produce a cultural layer on the map. Rather than the traditional approach of well-defined survey questions, Red Zone Stories follows Presner, Shepard, and Kawano (2014) in offering an open-ended prompt and allowing the participant to respond to the red zone on their own terms. The University of Canterbury has well-established procedures to ensure research is carried out ethically, but using an app to collect data raised new ethical questions that hadn’t been considered before at UC. What does a consent form look like in the context of an app? How do you protect the privacy both of your participants and of other people around them when you’re giving them free rein to create their own data? How do you amplify the voices of the elderly and disadvantaged, when they are the people least likely to own a smart phone? In this paper we discuss these and other ethical dilemmas we faced, and the solutions we found. Presner, T. S., Shepard, D., & Kawano, Y. (2014). HyperCities : thick mapping in the digital humanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Samuel Hope

Univeristy of Canterbury Arts Digital Lab

Jennifer Middendorf

Manager, University of Canterbury Arts Digital Lab