A Process for Discovering Truth? Can credentialed chains, or other ID Tech, help create authentic voices learning from historical research practices of Museums & Archives.

A Process for Discovering Truth: Can Credential Chains (or Other ID Tech) Help Create Authentic Voices? Learning from Historical Research Practices of Museums & Archives

Wednesday 6A

Convener: Sarah Allen

Notes-taker(s): Sarah Allen

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Session notes

• overview of digitization challenge at the Smithsonian in 2013, and exploration of linking meta data
  • [social network of dead people] idea (discussed at IIW 19 [Identities of Dead People])
  • realization at prior IIW that all the living people would become dead people someday ([IIW 17 - Data and ID after Death])
• genealogy & "truth" challenge
• Internet Archive doing project with wikipedia to cross-reference articles with physical source (e.g. books)
• certificate chains
  • Expert ⇒ linked to all claims, if found to be not fraudulent can revoke credentials
  • Institution ⇒ claims
  • Amateur researchers / citizen scientists
• How to stitch primary source material into authority
• Problem of attribution in case of name changes, marriage
• Examine “network of provenance”
• Having an idea is not enough to claim invention
• Idea of linked relationships, maybe the social network (of historical figures) is the important data to capture — yet how do we know? This is captured in the primary source materials, records of visits, journals, letters
• Problem
  • Modern truth is re-written on the fly
  • “Notability” threshold in wikipedia pages for people
  • Trust in “anti-vax” community, single trusted source of truth in a community, not dissimilar to each of us who have trusted sources
  • Trust and deconstruction of Big 3 media (bygone era of network TV) and the need to rebuild what trust is (what is our consensus) To replace no trust (current era)
  • Altering history, deep fakes
• [Chris Savage] “Managing the ambient trust commons”
• Sloan foundation looking for ways to establish trust at scale
• what if we were able to capture (and inspect) the trust chain?
• Use case: reassemble artifacts collected in one expedition collected in one event and distributed to many different museums / archives
• Related to git and signing commits

Related Work

• 2013 research: Crowdsourcing landscape ([slides], [full notes])
• 2014 [Smithsonian People Project] — exploration of Named Entity Recognition (NER)
• 2019 explorations w/ notes about usefulness
  • The [Semantic Lab] using Wikibase (because [reasons]), eg with [Linked Jazz] and their cool tools (on the right-hand side)
    • ... but where's the source?
  • [Zooniverse.org] has [projects] that I feel are along these lines
    • the source is open but I wonder about the accessibility of their data sets
  • [FamilyHistories.info] has ideas for [indexing]
    • source and data are open but links may be broken so write collaborator Trent if you'd like to see it fixed
  • [FromThePage.com] transcription tool
    • but proprietary and [rather costly]

Next Steps

What to do to push this process forward?  Brainstorm here

• What problems might we be solving?
• Learn / Contribute To / Report On existing tools?
• Create a set of standards for any dataset that purports to support truth discovery (eg. data locations, dates, contributor identities, reference codebases, ideally with some cryptographic signatures on it all)
• Curate collections of data sets that help get at the truth
• More philosophizing

Specific next steps (Sarah is exploring options for pilot project this summer)

• Clear Problem Statement
• Pilot project ideas (could be small, focused technical approaches OR small-ish data sets where we can validate how people would add links as they add data)
  • Wordpress plugin (or jekyll, hugo)
  • SF Japanese community stories (Wendy has a connection here, Sarah to follow-up in June)