Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Sava Saheli Singh.

It was tough to pick links for this week’s round up because there is always so much going on. The following collection of a wide range of topics all point to one thing: we’re at a point in time where big decisions are being made about what we do with data and media, and these decisions can and will affect how we teach, learn, and live in a world that is well past being untouched by technology.

There have been a couple of interesting open access tools released recently that can have an impact on research efforts:

PRISONER is an interesting approach that takes ethics into consideration for conducting social network research, forcing data that is collected to adhere to particular ethical parameters that PRISONER has set. TACIT is an open source Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool developed by the Computational Social Science Lab at USC. This tool aims to provide a one-stop platform with which to gather, analyze, and manage data from online sources ranging from Reddit to US Supreme Court transcripts. Amanda Visconti provides a great round up of resources on data visualization tools as they relate to the digital humanities. And finally, if you want data visualizations to help you keep up with various occurrences across the ‘net, you might want to consider the Internet Monitor’s new Internet Dashboard.

Speaking of tacit, Aimée Morrison recently wrote about tacit knowledge in graduate education and calls for making implicit knowledge more explicit, including starting a twitter hashtag – #tacitPhD – so people can contribute to the different types of tacit knowledge they were given during the course of their graduate lives.

In news that will certainly affect how we access technology and media online, the Librarian of Congress is stepping down, bringing up the question of who is the right kind of person to take over. As Politico reports, the Library of Congress has been called out for seeming behind the times when it came to technology adoption and it appears that there is a push for a more “tech savvy” person to take the helm. Let’s hope that bringing more technology to the Library of Congress means increased access not only for researchers and academics but also for the general public.

Selfies are an undeniable part of our lives now, for better or for worse. They are an increasingly common topic in classrooms and research, but there is a case that may have some interesting ramifications for selfie ownership. In a twist to a story that started last year when the copyright of a monkey selfie was brought into question, Sarah Jeong provides an interesting look at PETA’s case against the photographer who claimed copyright of the monkey selfie. The outcome of lawsuits like this – while seemingly trivial at first – can have ramifications beyond animal selfies to affect digital media production and representation as a whole.

To round out this round-up, a few more interesting things to keep on your radar:

• In their ongoing series #fight4edu, the Futures Initiative at CUNY continue the conversation through workshops and online discussions.
• If you have worked on research that deals with big data and dealt with ethical conflicts, the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society will pay you to add your case study to their collection pedagogical resources.
• This panel at Columbia looks at whether Open Access to data is always a good thing.

Featured Image: Self-portrait of a female Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, who had picked up photographer David Slater’s camera and photographed herself with it. Source: Wikimedia Commons.