Toward Ethical Digital Practices: Guidelines for Consent, Accountability, and Transparency in Anthropology

Digital tools and imaging are now common practice in biological anthropology research. Ethical concerns around the management, use, and display of digital human remains are a budding topic of discussion. Currently, there are no formalized discipline-wide guidelines or standards for digital ethics in biological anthropology. To bridge the gap between ethical standards and digital practices, we need to gauge current digital tools and resources used by professionals, as well as the state of ethical codes for professional organizations regarding digital media in biological anthropology.

This study reviews ethical statements from five professional organizations and survey responses from biological anthropologists on their use and opinions of digital remains. Text analyses were performed on ethics statements to identify terms related to digital remains and on survey responses to identify key themes in opinions of digital ethics.

Results demonstrated that only one organization mentions digital ethics while survey results indicate researchers are creating and using digital tools in their research. Thematic text analyses underline the need for consent, digital ethical guidelines, anonymity, data security, and cultural sensitivity and respect.

These results highlight the gap in practice and guidelines for digital ethics. We propose immediate action items, including the development of a cross-cultural, disciplinary working group to generate cohesive digital ethics standards, explicit statements on digital human remains in donor forms, the addition of digital best practice standards into organizations' ethics codes, and ethics statements added to current digital platforms. These proposed ethical guidelines and questions for donor forms are provided for these action items.