OPPORTUNITY: Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Institute

UC Berkeley Library has been awarded nearly $50,000 by the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Program to fund the study of legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining, which builds on a 2019 project, Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining, Cross-Border (LLTDM-X). The goals of LLTDM-X are:

…to design instructional materials and institutes to support digital humanities TDM scholars facing cross-border issues, but our first step with LLTDM-X is getting a better handle on the specific law and policy challenges they face.

Through a series of virtual roundtable discussions, and accompanying legal research and analysis, LLTDM-X will surface these cross-border issues and begin to distill preliminary guidance to help scholars in navigating them.

The first roundtable will engage U.S. digital humanities text data mining practitioners in sharing their cross-border TDM experiences. U.S. and global law and ethics experts will help guide the roundtable discussion to elicit the contours of practitioner experiences. During two subsequent roundtables—one focusing on cross-border copyright and licensing, and another on cross-border privacy and ethics—the experts will discuss practitioners’ hurdles in depth, and begin to develop customized guidance.

After the roundtables, we will work with the law and ethics experts to create instructive case studies that reflect the types of cross-border TDM issues practitioners encountered. These case studies will incorporate recommendations to help a broad audience of U.S. digital humanities text data mining practitioners navigate LLTDM-X concerns. Case studies, guidance, and recommendations will be widely-disseminated via an open access report to be published at the completion of the project. And most importantly, they will be used to inform our future educational offerings.

The Institute seeks US-based researchers who have or would like to do a computational text analysis project on materials held outside of the US. The grant funds up to $800 to participants. Applications are online, here.