Should DHers accept funding from military agencies or defense contractors? Should such funding sources be rejected on principle, or should they be evaluated on a case by case basis using criteria such as basic vs. applied research, the exact nature of the deliverables, and open vs. proprietary outcomes? Discussion welcomed.
Should DHers accept military/defense funding?
(12 posts) (7 voices)-
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
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Matt, I don't think I have much light to shed -- except that, to your "case by case" criteria, I'd add considering the wishes of the entire project team, including faculty, staff, and student workers, regardless of where local university policy may lodge intellectual property ownership.
But I thought I'd mention (lest readers see your question as purely academic) how often this has happened to me and to the project teams I've worked with -- particularly on tool-building projects of various sorts, even when we assume our aims are so fundamentally humanistic that they'd be of little interest to such groups. In fact, it has happened on every single tool-building project I've been involved in. (Yes, even Juxta and Ivanhoe could have been bombing villages.)
It'd be nice to think that, as people are ramping up formal grad programs in DH, a course on research ethics would be in the mix.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
dougreside@gmail.com
MemberReplying to @mkirschenbaum's post:
An ideological "no" would be hard for me to defend (no pun intended...). If we feel like the deliverables are of broad enough use (and not specifically intended to harm), it seems to me that there is very little difference between accepting money from the DoD or the NEH. Unless we are developing closed source software, our openness means that there is the potential for our work to be used by anyone (and not just the DoD but also "enemy" combatants). DoD money is tax payer dollars no less than the IMLS. If the concern is simply that we are taking "blood money," then we should refuse all funds doled out by all bellicose governments. Of course, it's in the particulars of the project that things get messier, but a categorical refusal seems irrational (at least to this son of a defense department aerospace engineer...)
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
neal.audenaert@gmail.com
MemberAre you asking if we should expect all DHers to do SUCH-AND-SUCH or if we willing to accept people with differing ideological backgrounds? Presumably rejecting defense funding on principle would be on the the principle the U.S. military (or other funding entity) is an immoral and/or illegitimate enterprise. I'm sure there are many in our community who hold that view, but should we require (or otherwise marginalize dissenters) all members of the community hold to my particular convictions on an issue?
While there are some cases where the uniform application of a moral litmus test seems reasonable (e.g. intentionally supporting human trafficking), I think we should think very carefully about statements in the form of 'all DHers should not do XX.'
We each have a responsibility (er. . there's that universal moral obligation thing again) to conduct our research with the utmost scholarly integrity, and the field certainly has a responsibility to evaluate whether or not we've met that obligation. Still, I think on issues that aren't extraordinarily clear cut, we should give people a wide latitude in following their convictions, and we should infringe on those convictions only reluctantly and after <i>very</i> careful consideration.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @neal.audenaert@gmail.com's post:
No, I'm not trying to be prescriptive for the field or to suggest that anyone be marginalized. Just want to have the discussion. But yes I have a reason, and in fact I think it's a question we'll be seeing a lot more of. (The public debate over academic anthropology's participation in "human terrain analysis" is worth tracking as an example of a neighboring field coming to grips with similar issues: http://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists/).
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
neal.audenaert@gmail.com
MemberI hope my response didn't come off personally - you asked the question, you didn't pose an answer, and I didn't take you to be prescriptive. I do, however, want to suggest that we pay close attention to directions our answers take us. It is definitely a discussion worth having - and there are many thorny issues to think through. Certainly better to be thinking before it happens rather than after.
Whether right or wrong, the anthropologists certainly are being prescriptive.
Replying to @mkirschenbaum's post:
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
First, one case that I was tangentially connected to. A graduate of UMW asked me a few questions about Omeka for a project doing a history exhibit for one of the branches (I think it was the Air Force, but not sure). So, good solid DH like we do, but happened to be paid for by military.
More generally, I'm also prepared to accept some moral ambiguity, and maybe even do some negotiating, for example, by making sure that licenses and right to data collected in the process make things open to researchers and journalists. Even if I had personal misgivings, getting something like that in would ease my conscience.
BTW, similarly for private corporations. There might be even more latent misgivings about working with private businesses than with military
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Thanks to everyone for their considered replies to this (potentially) contentious question. In fact, however, at least going by the limited number of responses here (and including a couple on Twitter), it doesn't appear very contentious at all: the consensus seems to be that one simply evaluates such opportunities on a case by case basis while also recollecting the extent to which *all* federal funding is inevitably implicated in the actions of the State. Is that all there is to it then? Do we have our DH "answer"?
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
tedunderwood
MemberI think I agree with the consensus you just summarized, Matt. But I also think that this is potentially a fascinating and contentious issue. It's just that *all* the devils are in the details. The broad concept of "military funding" doesn't give us enough to argue about. A lot of what the military needs from IT is standard information-retrieval and records-management sorts of stuff; and though one could in principle object to managing military records, that would be a fairly hardline position.
I suspect the more interesting questions are going to involve privacy, and they won't be restricted to the military: corporations are also going to use data mining and text mining in ways that make us uneasy. Moreover, I bet the way we'll really be implicated in these issues has less to do with "funding" (from the DoD or Google or whomever) than it does with training. There's a huge emerging job market for data geeks, and the humanities could conceivably retool themselves to train students for that market. But doing so, I suspect, will be really controversial -- for a whole bunch of reasons, including the Foucauldian resonance of the word "mining."
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
I wonder if discussions like this will be both more common and more heated once a DH community or tool has been "burned" by a military connection?
This has already happened to anthropologists, obviously; does it explain their prescriptivist bent?
I'm definitely not trying to say that the DH community is naïve -- it's genuinely hard to imagine the off-label uses to which tools and techniques can be put! This is the glory and the horror of applied research! I do suggest that forecasting evil is wretchedly hard unless one is an oracle, while thinking about how to respond to evil (broadly writ) once it happens (which I daresay it will) may be both simpler and more useful.
So to start with, what are DH values that a military connection might threaten? (The anthropologists have put a LOT of effort into explicating precisely that. How much of that work might the DH community adopt wholesale?) How do DHers best defend those values?
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Dorothea wrote:
To start with, what are DH values that a military connection might threaten? (The anthropologists have put a LOT of effort into explicating precisely that. How much of that work might the DH community adopt wholesale?) How do DHers best defend those values?
This seems like the essence of the matter, along with Tim's well-put reminder that the devils are *all* always going to be in the details. For anthropologists, the predicament is that complicity in counter-insurgency operations is perceived as at odds with the field's professional commitment to trust and responsible engagement with indigenous populations. The Networked of Concerned Anthropologists puts it this way in their "pledge" statement:
US military and intelligence agencies and military contractors have identified “cultural knowledge,” “ethnographic intelligence,” and “human terrain mapping” as essential to US-led military intervention in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Consequently, these agencies have mounted a drive to recruit professional anthropologists as employees and consultants. While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects US soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding, at base it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties. By so doing, such work breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world and, directly or indirectly, enables the occupation of one country by another. In addition, much of this work is covert. Anthropological support for such an enterprise is at odds with the humane ideals of our discipline as well as professional standards.
(http://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists/NCA-pledge.pdf?attredirects=0)Are there similar cruxes in DH where our specific professional values (to the extent we can even articulate *those* coherently) are endangered by, say, work that relies on NLP and IR to yield analytics of large textual corpora?
Posted 5 years ago Permalink -
Well, I can think of some potential loci of difficulty:
- Traditional cultural expressions. The library and archive worlds are already struggling pretty hard with this one.
- Reidentification. DH needle-in-a-haystack techniques are as likely to produce this as anyone else's, assuming a contemporary corpus.
- Forensics. I'm sure I needn't explain all the ways forensic techniques can be abused! In a DH context, the value at stake is probably privacy; a literary scholar might not want J. Brilliant Author to delete all her email, but does that give a forensics expert the right to reconstruct it from traces on her hard drive? (This is why I'm terribly glad I'm not a Brilliant Author. I am outraged at the idea of someone thinking it acceptable to do this to me.) But is privacy a DH value?
- Reification of social divides we don't want reified. I recall a case of historical maps of Tokyo that, when georectified, delineated neighborhoods by current socioeconomic status with ugly accuracy.
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
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