Lex Ferenda

Karen McCullagh, former solicitor in Belfast (she escaped) and PhD student at the University of Manchester, spoke about private and sensitive data within the UK and the European Union. It’s a political (as opposed to thesis) interest of mine (1 | 2), and a core concern for Digital Rights Ireland.

Karen started off with showing the great ACLU private data animation, Pizza Palace (haven’t seen it in a while, but I want to use it in a class some day. Well done Karen - who even integrated it perfectly into the content of the presentation without even blinking at a strange computer setup). She gave a quick history and introduction to private and sensitive data in Europe, and told us about her project.

The project is a very ambitious one, including interviews, a large-scale telephone survey (conducted by the information commissioner, but with a lot of analysis by Karen), surveys of bloggers…and a lot of legal and statistical analysis and reflection added to the pot. It was interesting to hear Karen’s depiction of the tensions between her background (having studied law) and her current location (in a social statistics department).

Issues raised in the presentation and questions included:

• the difference between ‘protected’ sensitive data and ‘new’ categories (and the level of public concern of disclosure of the new categories, including biometric, clickstream, etc)
• the fact that 15% of the surveyed bloggers also kept a diary (and wondering how this compares to the full population’s diary-keeping habits
• how Karen dealt with the expert interviews and their concern for anonymity (with helpful suggestions from Helen of the OII
• the interesting way in which her snowball sample literally snowballed, with YouTubers making videos to encourage bloggers to do the survey

The final part of the presentation was a discussion of a proposed working definition of private data (moving away from categories of sensitive data). The definition, which I will reproduce when I get the full text, incorporates various elements and looks quite similar to an ECHR decision or indeed a convention provision (albeit more detailed) and is (at first glance) a better approach than the current EU directive. Some of the responses have indicated that there needs to be a presumption of privacy (i.e. not having private data as a subset of general data), and Karen has received a lot of voices expressing concern over national security exemptions. This is a complex legal issue but also a timely intervention in a politically crucial debate.

Fred Stutzman’s presentation (Social Technologies and Ongoing Relationship Management) was the first student seminar I attended this afternoon. He is doing his research on friend management and social networks - with a focus on transitions, e.g. between high school and college or college and the workplace. It is a very topical issue. Fred (who has created claimid.com and other projects) is interested in digital identity, but also in online social networks, and that’s part of what led him into the research. He started studying Facebook in 2005 (although they recently stopped him and other researchers from using data in a particular way - a real pity, in my view) but has moved on to looking at things like impression formation and the consideration of transition periods / migrating to the next period of life.

There are a number of technologies involved - IM, in particular, was mentioned, and I certainly agree. One of Fred’s questions was whether he should focus on one particular technology/application/system/tool, or broaden it out. He spoke at some length about the connection between adoption or use, citing the example of students who go to college together when email adoption is widespread, and continue to use email as a significant form of communication even when ‘younger’ generations have shifted to other tools.

Earlier, Judith Donath (MIT) and John Clippinger (Harvard) spoke about digital identity in general. It was a difficult enough topic, with a complicated (but rewarding) reading (Donath’s well-known Identity and Deception piece, a classic in the field). More on that a bit later.

So, as promised. Dan Gilmour started off with a telling remark, that citizen media is ‘evolution, not revolution’ (with ev pronounced as such, not ‘eev’), and continued with a presentaiton that took us through the world of citizen media, including some great examples (not least the classic Bush/Blair video; he noted that others, including Lawrence Lessig, use this to talk about copyright, but he used it to showcase remix culture) and with an underlying theme of moving from the “Daily Me” (as criticised by Sunnstein et al) to the “Daily Us” - a nice explanation.

Dan outlined some principles towards the end of the talk, and they’re worth reproducing in some more detail. People (as audiences) should be sceptical, adjust their ‘trust quotient’ for each site, keep reporting, and learn media techniques. While acting in the journalism sphere, they should be thorough, accurate, fair, independent (in thought), and in particular transparent.

Of course, this is difficult, but not entirely new. His example was the infamous JFK film - user-created influential content from over 40 years ago - but it’s not hard to find others. The difference, he argued, was a mixture of technology, business models, the practice of journalism, and more. Both Gilmour and David Ardia (from the floor) highlighted the importance of journalism rather than journalists (or from institutional focus to behavioural focus), the latter in response to my questioning on the importance of ’status of journalists’ law in the development and growth of citizen media (while noting that in particular areas, e.g. shield laws, actual malice standards etc, things are still quite unclear).

Steve Schifferes spoke about his experiences in the BBC - he has clearly had a lot of fun in his capacity as a Reuters Fellow, doing research on the BBC web presence. He took us through statistics on site use during the last election - I love the fact that there are huge spikes from people looking for election data (stats, counts, swings, etc). God bless the digital swingometer. He also highlighted a demographic difference (more male, more middle-class, younger), and the various attempts to promote user-generated content and interactivity.

Dan was quite good in pointing to the ups and downs of new forms of media - much more nuanced than is sometimes portrayed, it was certainly not a paean to the YouTube world, but there was a positive tone to the talk.

In the second session, John Kelly did talk a wee bit about his Usenet research (mentioned in the preview post from this morning) but the bulk of the presentation was newer, blogosphere work - with even more complicated and colourful graphs and visualisations of linking, tagging, buzzwords etc in blogs. A presentation rich in data, often surprising, and the author was very good at engaging with the material, asking for predictions/explanations etc before defining the graph or parameters (an old pedagogical tool, but often overlooked by statisticians!). As with the earlier discussion, Sunstein’s critique of people talking to their allies was part of the backdrop. Among the many points mentioned and illustrated were: conservative and liberal bloggers who link to ‘intellectual’ sources show more in common with each other than with their ideological bedfellows; ‘moonbat’ is a common term of abuse in conservablogging circles; the greatest amount of links go to the New York Times (i.e. the supposed other world of mainstream media).

A striking diagram was setting links ‘to the same side’ against ‘from the same side’ - with a huge majority of plotted points being in the top right corner (i.e. high proportion of incoming and outgoing links to/from the ’same side’) - and the fact that this differed from patterns of actual discussion (’attentive clusters’ etc). I’m impressed that Kelly does his own research, spidering, and so on - i.e. not relying on Technorati or Google.

He’s working on mapping out other languages and wants to do a book on the ‘global blogosphere’ and actively sought collaborators for this - I’m not an expert in the area but I’d love to read or review the book if it comes together…

Finally, do note this progress report from Dan Gilmour on the study of citizen media. Great timing, from my point of view

Dan Gilmour spoke this morning - fellow participant Aaron Veenstra calls him “something of a citizen-journalism/net-media evangelist and preach-practicer“. He was joined by Steve Schifferes (BBC, Reuters Fellow at OII), and David Ardia (director of the Citizen Media Law Project) chipped in from the floor. Much of what we talked about is very helpful to my own research interests - and the suggested readings gave me an excuse to re-read Cass Sunstein’s republic.com book (which has aged relatively well, although the ‘future’ he warned of hasn’t turned out exactly as suggested). Now, we’re listening to John Kelly, who is talking about political disourse in Usenet (here is the research, and the graphs here are amazing). As with the coverage of Sunshine Hillygus and Erica Johnson below, I’ll combine these two sessions into a single post a wee bit later on. (By the way, I don’t upload pictures until the evening, so they appear in posts at that stage, most of the time).

Headline to this post is a particularly memorable line from Dan’s talk.

Erica Johnson spoke in the second set of student presentations, and I chose to attend her talk (and not just because it was in the same room - I was very curious about her project on non-candidate blogging and elections). It turned out to be an interesting session for multiple reasons. Erica gave a very honest assessment of the difficulties of putting together a research project, and about half the room gave suggestions/comments/ideas; it was both reassuring and enticing at the same time. A point made on day one, about transforming your PhD topic from a noun into a verb, was recalled in the discussion.

Erica said: “My current research interest is too broad” - she’s certainly not the only one in that position! Someone (I think Ben Peters - Ben, correct me in comments if it wasn’t you) summarised the question that we should be asking - what keeps you up at night? (i.e. what are the big questions, what excites you, what are you worried about - all rolled into one).

Her own project, looking at non-candidate blogs during the 2000, 2004 and 2008 US presidential elections (from her beautiful vantage point in France), is the kind of thing that I love to read, although quite distant from my own research. In particular, she will be looking at three very different elections (one hasn’t even happened yet) with very different concepts of blogging and politics in each one.

Of course, there has been some work in this area already - and earlier in the day, we heard some of that work though Sunshine Hillygus of the school of politics at Harvard. Her research (and forthcoming book) deals with the impact of technology on campaigns and (in particular) how it affects candidates and their formation of policy. There were oodles of glorious statistics, with the general point being that despite the various ‘myths’ (that US voters are heavily polarised, that the floating voters are unmotivated, and that ‘divisive’ talk is just mobilising the base), microtargeting and the appeal to ‘cross-pressured’ voters (e.g. pro-life Democrats, anti-war Republicans, etc). The most interesting element, for me, was the discussion of the techniques of database-building and targeting. Instead of sampling and opinion polling alone, modern techniques often start with the (accessible and universal) electronic voter register, matched up with consumer data (bought), organisation membership lists (given) and so on, then some sampling and statistical model-building, and then heavily personalised contacts (I was impressed by the Democrats sending out flyers to pro-gun union members - “I care about two things - my guns and my job” - didn’t think they were that mercenary!). I doubt that it would be possible to be as thorough in the EU, due to data protection law, but certainly, it was part of the Blair revolution in some fashion). Hillygus wryly noted that all these special promises (and the almost exponential growth in the number of discrete policies in party platforms or debate speeches) lead to significant post-election problems…

As well as the extract from Hillygus’ own writing, we read The Very, Very Personal Is The Political (New York Times article) and Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship by Philip Howard.

Congratulations to my friend and Trinity colleague, Charles Larkin - his measured anger at higher education ‘reform’ was published (at length) in Foreign Affairs just this month: letter: An Academic Debate. For my own piece on academic values, I drew heavily on conversations with Mr. Larkin (Prof. Larkin according to the journal, and if they said it, it must be true!); however it’s better to read his own views rather than through my filter. So go read it.

The justification for the academy, according to William Brody, is to be found in its ability to provide the credentials and the research that form part of the engine of economic growth. But this view of education is the antechamber to academic stagnation. Its realization would mean that only “useful” ideas and disciplines would be cultivated, whereas others would be allowed to wither on the vine.

In other news, Harvard Square’s reputation for bookstores is well deserved. Today I bought:

• Consumed - Benjamin Barber (”How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole”)
• The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties- Coombe (ethnograpic approach to authorship and copyright - author Rosemary Coombe is at York University in Toronto)
• The Success of Open Source - Weber (history/analysis of open source software)
• The Anarchist in the Library - Sida Vaidhyanathan (a favourite of mine, so now I can stop borrowing it from the library)
• Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee - Nat Hentoff (classic Hentoff rant on free speech from an absolutist perspective)
• Harvard Rules - Richard Bradley (account of Lawrence Summers’ tenure as head of Harvard, although written before his departure!)

All bar the last being thesis-related (some more so than others), and the whole bill being a little more than €20 (across two shops and one stall).