What makes an expert witness? How does a socio-technical researcher become one? Now that we’re the end of this miniseries, we might finally be ready to answer these questions…

In the fifth instalment of Exhibit X, civic tech acrobat Elizabeth Eagen shares her pithy insights on how researchers of emerging technologies are starting to interface with litigators and regulators.

The questions we explore this week:

• When do the expertise of social scientists become ‘good’ enough to stand up in court — and who gets to decide that?
• How can the traditionally glacial system of courts and legislators keep pace with the shifting whims of technology companies?
• Litigators want social scientists to get on the stand and say ‘X caused Y’ without a shadow of a doubt — but what social scientist would do that?

Elizabeth Eagen is Deputy Director of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University, which works with communities to study the effects of technology on society and test ideas for changing digital spaces to better serve the public interest. She was a 2022-23 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, and serves as a board member at a number of nonprofit technology organizations.