What Is A Text? What Can Be Used?

What is a text?What can be used?
Vs. a (private) utterance
Does it matter who collected, and how?
Oct 20, 2010
Ethics and Internet Research Commons: Building a sustainable future

Current discussion on Air-L about whether blogs are “texts”, thus completely outside purview of IRBs
Oct 20, 2010
The act of publication is to make public a set of ideas, and at that point it becomes an artifact--a text--game for analysis without the concern of human subject research ethics (in my opinion).
Again, if the authors attempt to password-protect their work, that's an IRB-worthy issue, but otherwise, even if it's about a "personal matter," the act of publication is a public thing...thus no IRB needed.
(source redacted)

What is a text?
Presumption that any publication online is fair game for collection and use in research, so long as no proactive attempt was made to restrict access
Oct 20, 2010

Complications
Not all “publications” online are equal
Blogging is often a broadcast medium
Status updates / tweets have more of an imagined audience, even if public
Items are re-blogged, re-tweeted, typically without consent/control by source
Password-protection should not be the gold standard
Not everyone is technically literate
Presumption of limited visibility
Oct 20, 2010

Is this an open text?
A parent starts a blog for the local PTA, and the comments include remarks intended for that limited context & audience
An 18 year old starts a LiveJournal with personal content; anyone with an account can view it
A Twitter feed which includes re-tweets from identifiable accounts, unsure whether original tweets were open or restricted
Oct 20, 2010

What can be used?
Presumption that anything publicly accessible by any means is fair game
Oct 20, 2010

Complications
Just because something is accessible to a researcher doesn’t mean the owner meant it to be scraped, harvested, mined
Owner might have presumption of obscurity
Owner might not recognize power of crawlers and scrapers
Oct 20, 2010

Should these be used?
A public blog, now deleted from Blogger, is freely accessible via Internet Archive
A Twitter stream, long abandoned, with only 5 followers
Facebook profile data, from account started in 2007 with no recent activity, but with information forced to be public based on platform changes
Oct 20, 2010

Case 1: Pete Warden Facebook DB
Independent engineer devises way to scrape public Facebook accounts
Doesn’t access from within Facebook, thus (presumably) avoids violation of Facebook’s TOS
Harvests public profile information from 215 million accounts
Plans to release to public, without any de-identification
Oct 20, 2010

Case 1: Pete Warden Facebook DB
Is method of scraping, without even logging into Facebook, acceptable?
Did users envision this type of access and harvesting when making profile information public?
Can researchers use this data? What would an IRB say?
Oct 20, 2010

Case 2: Library of Congress to Archive Public Twitter Streams
LOC and Twitter strike agreement to have all public tweets archived
After a 6-month delay, all public tweets are sent to LOC
Non-commercial use only; not publicly available or available for bulk download
But will create “analytic tools”
Oct 20, 2010

Case 2: Library of Congress to Archive Public Twitter Streams
What personal information will also be included?
Name and bio?
Geo-locational data for each tweet?
My private tweets, that have been retweeted in public stream, are included
No opt-out.
Can researchers use this data? What would an IRB say?
Oct 20, 2010

What is a text?What can be used?
Vs. a (private) utterance
Does it matter who collected, and how?
Oct 20, 2010

What Is A Text? What Can Be Used?

by Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center, and Commons on Oct 20, 2010

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What Is A Text? What Can Be Used? — Presentation Transcript

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