The University Library System is seeking proposals from the entire Pitt community — faculty, staff, students, researchers and instructors — for programs during a “Data Ethics Across the Disciplines” series that the Digital Scholarship Services is organizing. 

As machine learning technology continues to develop, as data sharing policies and funder mandates evolve, and as the lives and work of researchers and students are increasingly implicated in the growing datafication of our society, conversations around the ethical creation and use of data — defined broadly — are vital to the success of the University’s mission, according to the call for proposals.

The series during the spring 2024 semester will include interdisciplinary talks, moderated panel discussions and unconference-style events — where participants set the agenda collaboratively at the beginning of the session — around the theme of data ethics.

The goal is to spark a cross-disciplinary conversation around research ethics pertaining to data collection, creation, analysis, organization, storage, sharing and other aspects of data-driven scholarship.

All events in this series will bring together speakers from disparate fields and backgrounds with the goal of promoting discourse across disciplinary boundaries around ethical concerns encountered when working with research data (both quantitative and qualitative).

Interest from all Pitt community members is welcome for co-presenting an informal talk, participating in a moderated panel discussion, and/or co-organizing one of two unconference-style events.

Possible event topics:

• Ethical data collection – what are the ethical implications for not only what data we collect but how we collect it (e.g. informed consent, interrogating bias and neutrality)?

• Ethics of data storage and sharing platforms – beyond data security, what issues do researchers face in selecting where to store and share data (e.g. proprietary Terms of Service, AI training on repositories, resource accessibility)?

• Data or algorithmic privacy – what methods are used across different disciplines, or what privacy concerns are faced when working with different kinds of data?

• Ethics of generative AI – what conversations are needed to empower researchers to interrogate machine learning algorithms (and the data on which they are trained) to better understand the ethical implications around their use in academia?

• Data harm – what are researchers doing to combat the data harms in different fields (e.g. consequences of everyday datafication, working with marginalized communities, combatting climate impacts of data storage)?

• Pedagogy of data ethics – how might instructors incorporate data ethics into the classroom?

Submit your expression of interest in participating in this series by Dec. 8, 2023, by filling out the form at the following link: https://bit.ly/pitt-dataethics2024.

Send questions to series facilitators Rachel Starry (rachel.starry@pitt.edu) or Dominic Bordelon (dbordelon@pitt.edu).