A common challenge highlighted during the institute was the fact that TDM practitioners encounter expanding and increasingly complex cross-border legal problems. (i) the materials they want to mine are housed in a foreign jurisdiction, or are otherwise subject to foreign database licensing or laws; (ii) the human subjects they are studying or who created the underlying content reside in another country; or, (iii) the colleagues with whom they are collaborating reside abroad, yielding uncertainty about which country’s laws, agreements, and policies apply.
Project Design
LLTDM-X was designed to identify and better understand the cross-border issues that digital humanities TDM practitioners face, with the aim of using these issues to inform prospective research and education. Secondarily, it was hoped that LLTDM-X would also suggest preliminary guidance to include in future educational materials. In early 2023, the project phone number database hosted a series of three online round tables with U.S.-based cross-border TDM practitioners and law and ethics experts from six countries.
The round table conversations were structured to illustrate the empirical issues that researchers face, and also for the practitioners to benefit from preliminary advice on legal and ethical challenges. Upon the completion of the round tables, the LLTDM-X project team created a hypothetical case study that (i) reflects the observed cross-border LLTDM issues and (ii) contains preliminary analysis to facilitate the development of future instructional materials.
The project team also charged the experts with providing responsive and tailored written feedback to the practitioners about how they might address specific cross-border issues relevant to each of their projects.