Medical Privacy Under Threat in the Age of Big Data

The Intercept has a good introductory story about Medical Privacy Under Threat in the Age of Big Data. I was surprised how valuable medical information is. Here is a quote:

[h]e found a bundle of 10 Medicare numbers selling for 22 bitcoin, or $4,700 at the time. General medical records sell for several times the amount that a stolen credit card number or a social security number alone does. The detailed level of information in medical records is valuable because it can stand up to even heightened security challenges used to verify identity; in some cases, the information is used to file false claims with insurers or even order drugs or medical equipment. Many of the biggest data breaches of late, from Anthem to the federal Office of Personnel Management, have seized health care records as the prize.

The story mentions Latanya Sweeny, who is the Director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard. She did important research on Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery and has a number of important papers on health records like a recent work on Matching Known Patients to Health Records in Washington State Data that showed that how one could de-anonymize Washington State health data that is for sale by search news databases. We are far more unique than we think we are.

I should add that I came across an interesting blog post by Dr Sweeny on Tech@FTC arguing for an interdisciplinary field of Technology Science. (Sweeny was the Chief Technologist at the FTC.)

Towards monocultural (digital) Humanities?

lenguas-utilizadas-revistas-hd
Domenico Fiormonte has written a nice essay on how the humanities (and digital humanities) run the risk of becoming monolingual, Towards monocultural (digital) Humanities?. The essay is a response to Greg Crane’s The Big Humanities, National Identity and the Digital Humanities in Germany and Greg responds then to Domenico here. The numbers are depressing (see the graphs from Domenico above). As he puts it (drawing on research with a colleague into DH journals):

These data show that the real problem is not that English is the dominant language of academic publications (and of DH), but that both Anglophone and a high percentage of non-Anglophone colleagues barely use/quote non-Anglophone sources in their research.

I can’t help thinking that the internet has allowed the big to get even bigger. The dominance of English in academic circles is exacerbated by the instant availability of English research. National languages don’t even have location as an advantage on the internet.

What can we do about it? Miran had a nice reply on Humanist (to the original posting by Greg Crane that was also on Humanist.) Domenico suggests that we all have to take some responsibility, especially those of us who have the “free ride” of being native English writers.

It is the responsibility of dominant languages and cultures to translate from marginal or less influential languages.

DH 2015 in Sydney, Australia

Digital Humanities 2015 (DH2015) is now finishing up. I have been keeping my conference notes here.

The conference was held on the lovely campus of the University of Western Sydney. I was part of a couple of events and papers at this conference including:

  • News Scholars Symposium: With Rachel Hendry, I helped organize a pre-conference event for new scholars. This was supported by CHCI, centerNet, the Kule Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Western Sydney.
  • I participated in a public panel on Building Communities and Networks in the Humanities where I talked about some of the forms of public engagement that we are trying at the Kule Institute including the Around the World Conference.
  • I helped Stéfan Sinclair with a workshop on Voyant 2.0 (link goes to current version which will soon be 2.0).
  • I gave a paper with Stéfan Sinclair on “Talking about Programming the Digital Humanities” that traced a history of the discussion about programming and tools in the digital humanities.
  • Finally, John Montague gave a paper on “Exploring Large Datasets with Topic Model Visualizations” that I was involved in. This paper discussed a visualization for exploring the results of topic modelling that you can try in prototype here.

It is hard to summarize a whole conference, but I would note some of the questions that the new scholars posed in the unconference are worth thinking about:

  • How does one learn about the field of digital humanities?
  • How does one learn skills in the digital humanities?
  • How does one teach the digital humanities?
  • What are the ethical issues in digital work in the humanities?

Depositing Archives

We have recently deposited two research archives here at the University of Alberta. One is the John B. Smith Archive. You can download bundles or the complete archive which can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/10402/era.41201. Amy Dyrbye and I worked with John B. Smith to assemble this, document it and deposit it in ERA (the Education and Research Archive).

Another archive that we are building is a collection around Gamergate. The DOI for this is:

doi:10.7939/DVN/10253

For this we are using Dataverse that allows us to manage the archive and publish some parts or not.

Given the work that goes into developing and documenting these archives I would argue that they should be considered scholarly work, but that is another matter.

KIAS shrinks carbon footprints “Around The World”

The Office of Sustainibility at the University of Alberta has recognized our work at the Kule Institute for Advanced Study to develop models for sustainable research. They have published a nice story about the Around the World conference that we run with the title, KIAS shrinks carbon footprints “Around The World”. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether our academic reward system isn’t encouraging flying to conferences where other means of meeting would work. What would it mean to do sustainable research?

diyMatrix: Bertin’s Manual

bertin machine

I have long been interested in Jacques Bertin, a pioneer in thinking about visualization. His Semiology of Graphics is a classic. I had been thinking it would be great to try or simulate his way of doing cluster analysis with physical matrices which he called “dominos”. I was therefore pleased to see that someone has recreated his matrices, see DIY Matrix.

Charles Perin, Pierre Dragicevic, and Jean-Daniel Fekete have updated the matrices and fabricated a version for a CHI’15 workshop on Investigating the Challenges of Making Data Physical (PDF).

Update: They also have a web application called Bertifier that allows you to try it virtually. This interactive allows you to choose different ways of decorating the blocks and will then also reorder them. It is fascinating to play with.

interactiveBertin

Now I have something I want to print on a fabricator.

CSDH/SCHN & ACH 2015 conference

This week I’m at the CSDH/SCHN & ACH 2015 conference in Ottawa. I’m keeping my conference notes here. Some of the papers being presented that I’m involved in:

“Visualizing Philosopher and Topic Frequency Data Gathered from Named Entity Recognition Tools”
Schenk, Kevin; Simpson, John; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Chartier, Ryan; and Montague, John

“Data Stewardship in the Digital Humanities”
Sapach, Sonja Christina; Rockwell, Geoffrey; and Catherine Middleton

“Characteristic Curve: Reinterpreting Early Analytics”
Rockwell, Geoffrey and Stéfan Sinclair

“#GamerGate: Distant Reading Games Discourse”
Andrea Budac, Geoffrey Rockwell, Ryan Chartier, Todd Suomela and Sean Gouglas

“Wicking Ideas”
Budac, Andrea; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Palmer, Zachary; Budac, Robert; and Stan Ruecker

Digital Demonstration: “Voyant Tools 2.0: The New, The Neat and the Gnarly”
Sinclair, Stéfan; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Sinatra, Michael; and Marcello Vitali Rosati

Digital Demonstration: “TAPoR 3.0”
Rodriguez-Arenas, Omar Isidro; Schenk, Kevin; Radzikowska, Milena; Ranaweera, Kamal; Sinclair, Stéfan; McKellar, Mark; and Geoffrey Rockwell

Digital Demonstration: “Game of Writing (GWrit)”
McKellar, Mark Pearse; Rockwell, Geoffrey; Ranaweera, Kamal; In, Aiden; Ru’Aini, Melania; Graves, Roger; Graves, Heather; and Omar Rodriguez-Arenas,

 

Pachinko Development Story

Wandering around the KYORAKU company web site I came across a recruitment section including two manga that tell (dramatised) stories of the development of machines. The image above is from one of the manga that tells the story of the development of a pachinko Winter Sonata, a popular Korean soap. Pachinko machines like this are developed to attract more women into pachinko parlours as audience numbers are declining. I was struck that the team, at least as shown in the comic, has no women designers, which raises the question of whether there are any women designers?