The Ethics of Big Data

This panel discussion will explore the dilemmas that arise when the use of “Big Data” mining and analytic techniques clash with professional ethics and personal privacy rights. A panel of librarians, educators and activists will debate the ethical ramifications of the use of personal data for political goals or business profits. MODERATOR Patricia Condon is the research data services librarian at the University of New Hampshire. In this role, she supports library services that accommodate the growing data management and preservation needs of the UNH research community and collaborates with units across campus to coordinate a campus-wide data services infrastructure. Condon has more than 15 years of experience researching, teaching and working in the information disciplines. She earned her Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and her MLIS and MA in Anthropology from the University of Southern Mississippi. Condon is on the planning committee for the New England Research Data Management Roundtables and is the Treasurer for ACRL-NEC. She also teaches digital stewardship and digital preservation courses at Simmons College and Kent State University. PANELISTS Kevin Healey is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire. His work examines the religious and ethical dimensions of digital media. His current book project, Religion and Ethics in the Age of Social Media: Proverbs for an Era of Responsible Digital Citizenship (co-authored with Robert H. Woods., Jr.), is under contract with Routledge. Healey is one of 13 grantees in the three-year Public Theologies of Technologies and Presence grant program sponsored by the Institute for Buddhist Studies, the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Henry E. Luce Foundation. Last spring, he was recognized with UNH's Excellence in Teaching award. Hannah Hamalainen is the geospatial and earth sciences librarian at the University of New Hampshire. She received her MLIS from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She is the current president of the Geoscience Information Society (GSIS). She is an advocate for data visualization, science communication, geoscience education and developing critical thinkers using information literacy. Her research interests include using remote sensing and geospatial technologies to solve problems in the natural world. Claire Lobdell is the distance learning librarian and archivist for Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Mass., where she teaches information literacy skills in-person and online. She has worked for close to a decade in libraries and archives including at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amherst College and Wood Memorial Library & Museum in South Windsor, Conn. In 2017, she published South Windsor, part of the Images of America series. She is part of the inaugural, 2018 cohort of the Library Freedom Institute, a six-month long program that teaches privacy advocacy skills to librarians.