Nicholas Proferes

Purpose: This paper aims to detail collectively identified emerging needs around genAI, its current impact and future role within the information fields and higher education from a workshop held at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Conference. The goal of the workshop was to conceptualize possible futures and to grapple with how faculty ought to respond to, or even build, these futures to improve information science education in the years to come. Design/methodology/approach: The report was developed from day-long, structured conversations among participants at a Futures Workshop at the 2024 Annual Meeting of ASIS&T. The sections outlining the primary overarching themes and findings from the workshop were written by teams of authors identified at the workshop, and developed afterwards through a collaborative writing process. Findings: Participants identified four grand-challenges: policy and ethics, including the need for holistic survey and evaluation of institutional AI policies paired with outcomes-based evaluation; political economies, and the necessity of tracing the changing political economy of knowledge production in the context of education; educational outcomes and practice, including the importance of adapting information science education and introducing new or revised pedagogical practices during a period of technological transition; and the potential for exacerbating inequalities in access, outcomes and power, particularly among students. Originality/value: This report aims to detail the nature of these grand challenges to encourage those in the academic community to continue this work along the dimensions of research, policy engagement (nationally or locally), ongoing dialogue with colleagues and both descriptive and normative evaluations of the impact of AI in the information professions.

Residents of communities increasingly rely on geographically focused groups on online social media platforms to access local information. These local groups have the potential to enhance the quality of life in communities by helping residents learn about their communities, connect with neighbors and local organizations, and identify important local issues. Moderators of online community groups—typically untrained volunteers—are key actors in these spaces. However, they are also put in a tenuous position, having to manage the groups while simultaneously navigating desires of platforms, rapidly evolving user practices, and the increasing politicization of local issues. In this paper, we explicate the visions of local community groups put forward by Facebook, Reddit, and NextDoor in their corporate discourse and ask: How do these platforms describe local community groups, particularly in reference to ideal communication and community engagement that occurs within them, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize these ideals? Through a qualitative thematic analysis of 849 company documents published between 2012 and 2023, we trace how each company rhetorically positions these spaces as what we refer to as a “local platformized utopias.” We examine how this discourse positions local volunteer moderators, the volunteer labor-force of civic actors that constructs, governs, and grows community groups. We discuss how these three social media companies motivate moderators to do this free, value-building labor through the promise of civic virtue; simultaneously obscuring unequal burdens of moderation labor and failing to address the inequalities of access to voice and power in online life.

This SIG will engage CSCW researchers in a collaborative discussion on the use of UGC from social platforms for academic research. In recent years, both the importance and difficulty of accessing such data for scientific inquiry have increased. Drawing on early experiences from Reddit's 'Reddit for Researchers' data-sharing initiative, this session will: (1) identify key directions in social computing research that such initiatives can support, (2) enumerate ethical and user safety concerns which must be addressed, and (3) ideate governance models to enable community-driven review of research data requests. Participants will inform the design of a more inclusive and effective research environment for the study of social platforms, better bridging the gap between industry and academia.

Reddit is one of the world's most prominent social media platforms, and also a valuable source of data for internet researchers. However, working with this kind of data also presents novel ethical complications for researchers, including issues around privacy, vulnerable populations, and unintended consequences. This paper describes an analysis of 134 papers that rely on Reddit data while also including some discussion of ethical implications and/or considerations by the researchers. Our analysis of these papers reveals common ethical issues and ethically motivated methodological decisions, as described by the researchers themselves, while also exposing some gaps for further ethical contemplation for researchers relying on Reddit data. Based on these findings, we close with a set of recommendations for ethically-informed methods and reflection for researchers working with social data.

This article offers a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, published between 2010 and 2020. Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations.

Digital technologies help researchers gather, analyze, store, and share data in novel ways. But how do digital humanists ensure that these new practices help us also achieve the good life and further moral progress? What new challenges does digital humanities research bring to our ethical values of the equitable distribution of knowledge, balancing risks and minimizing harms to research subjects and researchers themselves, and respecting autonomy? This chapter outlines key contemporary ethical questions that digital humanities scholars face today. These include dilemmas about the ethics of data storage and curation of cultural materials, consent of users in the context of big data research, data use and re-use, open-access and meeting moral obligations to share research outputs with non-academic communities, researcher reflexivity in scholarship, the ethical complexities of research funding while maintaining humanist ideals. While researchers have always wrestled with many of these ethical dilemmas, the particular characteristics of digital humanities scholarship and its contextual position in the academe raise novel facets. After describing some of the pressing ethical questions facing DH today around storage and curation, consent, data use and re-use, open access, reflexivity, and maintaining humanist ideals, this chapter argues that digital humanists, as part of their work, need to engage in what Brey (2000) describes as disclosive ethics. Disclosive ethics facilitates practitioners in identifying morally opaque facets of digital work, flagging situations in which our previous models of thinking fall short and helping us navigate moral vacuums when answers to these dilemmas are not readily available in rules or guidebooks. Disclosive ethical analysis can help researchers interrogate the embedded values of storage and curation, consent, data use and re-use, open access, reflexivity, and maintaining humanist ideals, with an eye to how we can refines these practices to uphold equitable distribution of knowledge, appropriate balancing of risks and minimizing harms to research subjects and researchers themselves, and respect autonomy.

Publicly accessible social media data is frequently used for scientific research. However, numerous questions remain regarding what ethical obligations researchers have in regard to using such content. We report on researchers' own views and practices regarding informing, getting consent from, and sharing research outputs with users when using publicly accessible social media data. Findings reveal both diverging current practices and views on what researchers ought to do in the future. Some researchers view the ethics of public data use as merely requiring compliance with the requirements of their ethics board, while others' ethical practices go beyond what is minimally required. Some researchers worry about the effects of contacting users to inform, seek consent, or share outputs with users. Yet others note that they want to build bridges with online communities through these mechanisms, but struggle with a lack of precedent and tools to do so at scale.

In the month before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Wikileaks released 37 serialized batches of e-mails authored by former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Each release was announced using a unique PodestaEmail related hashtag (#PodestaEmails2, #PodestaEmails3, etc.). In total, Podesta e-mail related hashtags hit town-wide, country-wide, or worldwide Trending topics lists a total of 1,917 times, remaining on Trending Topic lists everyday within the U.S. for 30 days before election day. In this article, we discuss how Wikileaks’ release methodology increased the potential reach of Podesta E-mail related content. We describe how Wikileaks’ tweets spoke to two audiences: Twitter users and Twitter algorithms. In serializing its content and using new hashtags for each release, Wikileaks increased the potential persistence, visibility, spreadability, and searchability of this content. By creating the possibility for this content to remain persistently visible on the Trending Topics list, Wikileaks was able to potentially realize a greater degree of agenda-setting than would have been possible through singular hashtag use.