The DARIAH ELDAH consent form wizard

In this poster, we would like to introduce the “consent form wizard” developed by the DARIAH-EU working group “Ethics and Legality in Digital Arts and Humanities” (ELDAH). This tool is currently under development and will be finalized and available in time for the DH2020 conference. It will enable digital scholars as well as the wider research infrastructure community to quickly and easily obtain a standardized consent form that is conforming to the obligations and regulations of the European Union General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) and therefore legally valid in all of the European Union. Depending on the context for which consent is obtained (e.g. use of images of people at academic events, processing of information shared in surveys, collection / processing of personal data), the wizard users will receive a consent form tailored to their specific needs after answering a series of questions. The different scenarios are the result of discussions with participants of the DH2019 in Utrecht and the DARIAH Annual Meeting 2019 in Warsaw and hence driven by the needs of the research community. Additional meetings with stakeholders from cultural heritage organisations (e.g. ICARUS) and the DARIAH-EU community will ensure a critical evaluation as well as a pragmatic, user-friendly implementation of the tool.It will be inspired by the code of the CLARIN LINDAT Public License Selector (cf. Kamocki et al. 2016) which offers the same service for license selection that we would like to develop for obtaining a consent form. Software developers, legal experts and (digital) humanities researchers will cooperate in the development of this tool, which - while legally addressing the strict data protection regulations of the European Union - will also be of use for the international research community outside Europe, since the consent forms will provide a best-practice template for ethical research conduct when processing personal data, and hence address the increasingly prominent topic of ethical research practice and scientific behaviour, especially in a largely digital, Internet-based research context (cf. Markham & Buchanan 2012, McKee & Porter 2009).The presentation of the poster at the DH2020 conference will allow us to present the wizard to colleagues outside our European network, discuss their needs and experiences with the protection of personal data and hence, if appropriate, adapt the wizard to reflect a global rather than European common perspective on research ethics and the processing of personal data.