Know Means Know: Using Radical Empathy to Define Consent in Digital Archiving

Abstract As many archives increase digital access to their holdings, there is a need for a clear policy on how institutions can ethically include sexual materials in digital collections. These materials are vital to building inclusive collections, but they also deserve special consideration in balancing access with privacy. Such materials, particularly those with reference to sexual or gender-based violence, deserve a specific ethical framework because of their unique ability to cause continued harm to both subjects and users. This paper proposes the application of the radical empathy framework developed by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) to determine consent to digitize the materials and discusses some examples where this framework might apply.