Cyberspace: A Communal Place or a Place of

Separation?

Luciana DurantiUniversity of British Columbia

Zagreb, Croatia 11 November 2015

The Digital World is Physical• The concept of Cyberspace (the fifth dimension) comes from a refusal to

accept the physical extension of digital information in computer terminals, servers and other machines

• But there are many real places where our data/documents/archives reside These real places are often regarded as “places of separation” between those who provide the information and those who use it, but they are beginning to be regarded as “communal shared places”

• These places contain several instances of the same data/documents/records/archives: this redundancy is at the same time uncomfortable and desirable

• Duplicate data/documents, records/archives kept in these places make impossible to guarantee the right to be forgotten

• Does this also mean that we will be able to preserve indefinitely our data/documents/archives?

Conflicting ConcernsDigital data/documents/records/archives • are fragile: easily corrupted, manipulated, tampered with, lost,

become obsolete, destroyed—we must protect our digital memory• are of an unprecedented abundance, ubiquitous, pervasive, easily

accessible from anywhere, hackable, and all revealing—we must protect our privacy and the right to be forgotten

• allow for transparency, accountability, democracy: – we must support open data, open access, open government—the people view;

or – we must not create what can embarrass us (failure to document) or, if we create it,

we must not keep it (failure to archive)—some governments’ view

• allow for better intelligence, espionage, control: – we must provide more and detailed data (see Canadian long census)– we must avoid intrusion by deleting data after use

What is going to be?• We believe that we have a right to documentary memory

and to remember• We believe we have a right to oblivion and to forget

Is it possible to guarantee both rights? To answer, one must understand the concepts of redundancy and physicality as they are manifested in the cloud environment, that is, how data/documents/records/archives are produced and stored in the cloud

Digital Output in the Cloud• Data/documents are produced to be viewed differently based on choice of

browser, application, and user preferences, or perceived preferences, thus the authoritative version is impossible to establish

• Metadata may be constructed by any number of parties to manipulate the behavior of retrieval systems that use it, rather than to describe the documents or other digital objects, thus the context is hard to establish

• When the goal of writing is communication, documents may exist in many separate clouds and may be scheduled to self-destruct, or may never be destroyed (involuntary permanence)

• When the goal of writing is memory, documents may be voluntarily constructed on cloud repositories (e.g. DuraCloud), with copies of materials from a variety of provenances (e.g. Occupy Movement Archives)

• The digital data/documents /records/archives of persons, organizations and institutions may be mingled and undistinguishable. Why?

Because of the nature of the material, the behaviour of creators and users, and consequent challenges (legal, conceptual, methodological)

The Nature of the Material• ‘prodused,’ co-authored, crowdsourced• co-owned • multi-media• multi-contextual• linked yet atomic objects• private/public• liquid• ephemeral

Behavior of Creators/Users

• Reuse• Sharing• Control and Access

Reuse• Reuse is often remix, which results in derivative

works that may substantively change the intent and context of the appropriated material.

• Reuse involves successive cycles of use, modification, repurposing, and of course take-down notices (because people rather ask for forgiveness than for permission).

Sharing

• People share profiles for a variety of social media and web sites, and post material they consider informative.

• Social media platforms facilitate the movement of material from one circle of people to another.

• Groups assemble and change stories of activities and events.

Sharing (cont.)• Dynamic groups of employees from public agencies collectively

create a body of interlinked material related to a work project (e.g. gcpedia), a common interest, putting into question who owns it and what the context is.

• Contributions to social media by people, programs, committees, or agencies now dead are linked to ongoing, active contributions of the living, or disappear, or appear as created by their successors.

• Digital lives, activities, initiatives are linked to each other. • The place of separation is becoming a communal space

Control and Access• Massive amounts of data about individuals in the cloud are

controlled by corporations and governments (big data)• Medical records including genotyping or gene sequencing data,

medical history, prescription and insurance information, tests, and images are held by the medical establishment in community clouds which makes them accessible.

• Genealogies, factual biographies, biographic data and personal images available on the web belong to the private platform hosting them (Instagram, Facebook, Google).

• In addition to big data, open data and open government raise the issue of traceability to and identification of the source records (lineage)

Legal Challenges• Ownership (public/private – of records/metadata)• Authorship• Privacy (content and metadata)• Right to oblivion (content, metadata and archival description)• Intellectual rights (economic and moral rights)• Privileged information• Location Independence of Cloud Services (Legal

Jurisdiction)

Conceptual Challenges (from a records professional’s

viewpoint)• The nature of Provenance in a “communal space”:

– does it comprise at the same time one or more creating bodies, functions, networks, systems, applications?

– should it be agent-centered, object-centered (e.g. records assembled in a web page from a variety of content), process or workflow centered?

• The idea of reuse: does it broaden the relevant provenance to be documented beyond computing environments to the realm of human analysis and reasoning?

Conceptual Challenges (from a user’s viewpoint)

• What is the role of the description of provenance– in the determination of trust in data/records/archives? – in understanding rights over materials that are generated and

transformed through multiple systems, used, mixed and reused? • Can provenance as representation of use enable users to

interpret and make sense of heterogeneous sources of information?

• Can provenance descriptions be records that—while supporting chain of custody, traceability and authentication—infringe those same rights to oblivion, privacy, benefits from exploitation of data, and economic gain that we are supposed to protect?

Methodological Challenges• Should we records professionals provide descriptions of digital records

aggregations or rather the tools to navigate whatever is in the communal place?

• How do we represent the fluid and changing structure of aggregations of data/records/archives? – Shall we use visualization?– Shall we express provenance as a mathematical graph, where the

records are the nodes and the links among records resulting from the same activity, as well as agents, functions, rules, are the edges?

– Shall we use semantic technologies, ontologies and linked data models?

• How do we ascribe provenance when records creators contribute collectively to a shared system in a communal place?

• How do we describe the history of content and format migration?

Methodological Challenges (cont.)

• How will we describe– data provenance when we only know how to describe records (i.e.

fine grained vs coarse grained provenance)?– versioning, instantiation, ontogeny (descriptive language evolution)?– chronology of custody and location?– analytic provenance (i.e. sense-making – users’ exploration of sources

and their reasoning, which is the necessary context supporting reuse)?

• How do we authenticate crowdsourcing of descriptive metadata (i.e. provenance of the tags)?

• How do we capture human-technology interaction?We must be able to address all this question if we wish to preserve

data/records/archives in the cloud

PreservationDefinitions:

Preservation is the whole of the principles, policies, and strategies that controls the activities designed to ensure materials’ (data, documents, or records) physical and technological stabilization and protection of intellectual content. In this context,

Digital Preservation is the process of maintaining digital materials authentic and accessible during and across different generations of technology over time, irrespective of where they are stored

Preservation (cont.)Preserving digital data/documents/archives involves maintaining the ability to • re-produce or re-create them• identify and contextualize them• document and maintain their identity and integrity overtime• describe them and maintain the description available• maintain them accessible in context through conversion, migration,

addition of metadata

Do data/documents/records/archives stored in a myriad of servers, but not actually preserved as defined above, constitute “memory”? Obviously not, but how can we make real preservation possible?

The InterPARES Trust project aims to provide answers to this question.

InterPARES Trust (2013-2018)

The goal of InterPARES Trust is to generate the theoretical and methodological frameworks that will support the development of

integrated and consistent local, national and international networks of policies, procedures, regulations, standards and legislation concerning digital records entrusted to the Internet, to ensure public trust grounded on evidence of good governance, a strong

digital economy, and a persistent digital memory.

InterPARES Trust is funded by a 5-year SSHRC Partnership grant and matching funds from UBC and all the partners (in cash and/or in kind)

InterPARES Trust Participants• The International Alliance comprises 7 Teams:

North America Latin America Europe Asia Australasia Africa Transnational Organizations

• Supporting Partners

• Pro-bono Consultants

• Management Team

Methodology• Archival and diplomatics methods• We use auxiliary sciences to overcome specific challenges

– Resource-based theory because studies the technologic, managerial and relational means of maximizing competitive advantage

– Risk management because it studies vulnerabilities and ways to mitigate them– Design theory because it studies policy in situations with unknown variable– Digital forensics, because it studies the authenticity of digital material that do not

reside in the systems in which they were produced and kept– Human computer interaction; aero-spatial, cybercrime, and

telecommunication law; organizational theory, etc.• We integrate this knowledge into archival science, ensuring that the archival

system maintain its consistency and cohesion

Research Domains

Access

Infra-structure

ControlSecurity

Legal Issues

Research Cross-

Domains

Termi-nology

Policy

ResourcesSocial Issues

Education

Preservation as a Service for Trust (PaaST)

From these studies, InterPARES Trust is developing a model of preservation as a service for trust that every designated preserver (e.g. archives) can require CSProviders to respect

The storage of the material can be in the provider’s data centers, but does not need to be in a given institution, as long as the institution is the place where preservation functions are controlled

To develop a reference baseline InterPARES Trust is using UML (Unified Modeling Language) and working with the Object Management Group (OMG) detailing all the functional requirements that providers must respect.

Six Preservation Services• Preservation Receive Service -- ensures that a set of

records transferred to an Internet-based environment is complete and intact, and is in compliance with any agreements that are in force

• Record Characterization Service -- captures, reports and makes available the key attributes that characterize the records being transferred

• Authenticity Assessment Service -- captures and makes available the authenticity attributes for comparison to other records

Preservation Services (cont.)• Preservation Storage Service -- captures, reports and makes

available the attributes concerning the storage of the records, the movement within the storage system, and the replacement or upgrade of storage media and related technologies

• Preservation Transformation Service -- captures, reports and makes available the attributes related to the migration, conversion or transformation of the digital objects that constitute a preserved record or the software used to translate the digital bits into a human readable form.

• Preservation Dissemination Service -- captures, reports and makes available attributes about access to and dissemination of preserved records, certified copies

Service Construct• Uniquely numbered functional requirements for each service • Pre-conditions that must exist before the service can operate• Main work flow detailing the sequential normal operations of the

service• Alternate flows that address the error and exception handling

conditions that can arise• UML Class Diagram, Use Cases, and Activities• Other supporting documentation• Operations and attributes follow a standardized naming convention

that supports access and reusability across other operations and services

Ideally, though, we should be moving towards an Archival Cloud

An Archival Cloud Transparency:• An unbroken chain of legitimate custody would be demonstrable• Records reliability could be inferred from known creation processes• Records authenticity could be inferred from the documentary context

and a known preservation processStability:• An archival cloud would guarantee that each record’s context is defined

and unchanged, with all its relationships intact.Permanence:• Retention and disposition plans would be integrated with migration

plans• There would be no risk of termination of contract or provider for the

archival cloudAn archival cloud would provide a communal space for remembering

A Communal Space for Remembering

• Remembering involves understanding, knowledge, and recognition• The premise to remembrance is preservation, without which

data/documents/records/archives will go into oblivion, not because of physical absence but because of their absence from our consciousness

• But is preservation “presence” in our consciousness if it is not visible? • The online space where we create and access digital material may be a

communal place but is not a place of remembering• Remembering is a social endeavour facilitated by a community of

“remembrancers” and professional mediators• This is why we still have and need institutions like archives and

libraries housed in powerful, imposing buildings: so that oblivion does not become a state of mind.

Vancouver Public Library

United Arab Emirates National Archives

www.interparestrust.org www.ciscra.org

Director, Luciana Duranti

luciana.duranti@ubc.ca