A culturally situated model for data sovereignty and distributed data ownership

Protection of traditional knowledge becomes increasingly more difficult as we venture into the digital age where information is distributed, leaky, inferred, and shared socially. This project will explore the tension between an individual’s desire for digital self-expression and the group’s desire for data sovereignty and cultural protection as a distributed moral responsibility. This project aims to understand traditional communities’ information sharing practices, taste for privacy , cultural protectionism, and individual and group privacy perceptions. Tools and methods from data science, philosophy, computational social science, complex systems, and sociology will be utilized. Lovato and GRA8 will start by using Storywrangler and Natural Language Processing to analyze large textual datasets that reflect narratives from U.S. rural and traditional communities.

Team Members