Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital Environment: an exploratory analysis of the central role of trust

Abstract

This research seeks to illuminate several issues surrounding the ideas of authen-ticity, integrity, and provenance in the networked information environment. Its perspective is pragmatic and computational, rather than philosophical. Authenticity and integrity are in fact deep and controversial philosophical ideas that are linked in complex ways to our conceptual views of documents and artifacts and their legal, social, cultural, and historical contexts and roles. (See Bearman and Trant (1998) for an excellent introduction to these issues.)In the digital environment, as Larry Lessig (1999) has recently emphasized, computer code is operationalizing and codifying ideas and principles that, historically, have been fuzzy or subjective, or that have been based on situational legal or social constructs. Authenticity and integrity are two of the key arenas where computational technology connects with philosophy and social constructs. One goal of this research is to help distinguish between what can be done in code and what must be left for human and social judgment in areas related to authenticity and integrity.

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