Roundtable on the ethics of making publicly available historical data 'more' public through linkage and database construction

Abstract

Over recent decades there has been a burgeoning of individual-level population data available from historical records, including censuses, and birth, death and marriage registers. These can be linked to other historical material to form rich prosopographical demographic datasets; that is, individual life and family histories synthesised from a variety of sources for an entire population to enable the study of that population. The creation and analysis of these datasets raises ethical issues around individual and familial privacy. Although the data included are often technically publicly available, their linkage and inclusion in databases gives them a public profile they were unlikely to have in their former homes of archives, registers or libraries. The speakers will discuss what responsibilities researchers have in linking and analysing historical data on individuals and families, what rights current individuals and families have over the use of their ancestral histories, and what safeguards, if any, should be put in place. The speakers are key researchers on the 'Founders and Survivors' project, a multi-university, multi-disciplinary study tracing and analysing the life courses and genealogies of Tasmania's population from convict colonisation to World War One and beyond.