As recent massive leaks of classified data by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed, the U.S. government is taking advantage of previous court rulings that metadata shared with a third party carries no reasonable expectation of privacy to conduct upstream taps of telephone and web traffic metadata. With computer storage costs plummeting and processing speeds continue to curve upward, it has become feasible to capture massive amounts of metadata and to search it for patterns useful in anticipating terror attacks, locating enemies of the state overseas, and prosecuting computer network related crime. This process only works well if everyone’s metadata is available and if those being investigated are unaware of the metadata they are producing. This creates a legal system and by extension a society with asymmetric transparency. Is this desirable? Digital humanities is an emerging discipline that is heavily invested in the creation and use of metadata. More than that, digital humanists just grok metadata. That makes us qualified to participate in the conversation about metadata privacy. This talk would be an opportunity to consider what role digital humanities scholars could or should play in the transparency policy debates.

The question I would like to mull over with you is how can we use social networking and data gathering techniques to determine what are the practical virtues of a discipline? I am curious about this because of the resurgence of virtue ethics as an alternative to rule-based and consequence-based systems of ethics that we all have received almost by default from the 18th and 19th centuries. The virtues are those things at which we desire to be excellent and help us fulfill our chosen purpose. Developing a virtue ethics approach gives us a new way of solving ethical dilemmas based on fulfillment of purpose rather than adhering to rules or trying to predict outcomes. Introspection can reveal one’s own chosen virtues, but finding out a group’s virtues takes a great deal more cleverness and inventiveness, and if you are willing I would love to borrow yours for a while.