August 2007 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

A valuable addition to the discussion on IRBs
by Lois Ann Scheidt 15 Aug '07

15 Aug '07

I know there are lots more subtitles involved in Mary's research than this article outlines...and part of her work is online. This excerpt is taken from today's Inside Higher Education, summarizing some papers given at the Am Sociological Assoc meetings this week: * * * Mary L. Gray, an anthropologist at Indiana University at Bloomington, described her work in graduate school, which raised all kinds of red flags with her IRB at the time: She wanted to study the way gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth develop their identities in the rural Southeast, and she wanted to base her research on interviews with such youth, under the age of 18, without their parents' knowledge. Her project, she said, "had every imaginable red flag." With some regrets, she won IRB support by appealing to prejudice many have of the rural South. Although she had no evidence to make this claim, she argued that the situation in the rural South is "so awful" for the young people she was studying that she couldn't possibly approach their parents for consent. (Actually Gray believes that the situation for gay youth is more subtle and less uniform than she suggested, but she guessed it would work with the IRB, and it did.) Because the IRB was - like most IRB's - oriented around medical research, not social science, the focus was on potential harm that Gray could cause her research subjects in person. Gray reported that she received relatively little questioning or guidance from her IRB on one of her major areas of research: what the young people she studied wrote about themselves online. Gray developed her own ethics rules (she wrote to the subjects to ask permission), but she was struck by what was and wasn't considered important by the IRB. To the IRB, "distance read as objectivity" and so was by definition "good," she said. Never mind that what her subjects shared about themselves online was as important as the thoughts they shared in person. This points to Gray's broader critique of the IRB process. Social scientists frequently complain about IRB's failing to understand their studies, but Gray suggested it was time to move beyond the idea of just adding more social scientists to the panel. Rather, she said it was time to question certain underlying assumptions of IRB's and whether they even make sense for social science. It's not that Gray doesn't think there are ethical issues researchers must consider, but whether the medical model can ever work for projects that don't follow the pattern of having a hypothesis designed to lead to the dispassionate creation of generalizable knowledge. Gray said that "IRB fatigue" is discouraging researchers - especially graduate students - from even trying to get projects approved. * * * http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/14/soc

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Re: [Air-L] on the Wayback Machine (was public/private [part 1 of 2])
by Lois Ann Scheidt 15 Aug '07

15 Aug '07

> But to complicate your argument below (and Hughie's in a separate > thread), a couple of thought experiments: > > Say I place content on a "publicly accessible" webpage without > creating any incoming links or notifying anyone. Web crawlers won't > find it. A search engine won't index it. While on the open and public > Internet, unless a random URL-generator happens to guess the precise > address of the page, no one will ever read it. Is this content "fair > game for researchers"? I don't profess to be a "hardware" or a "search engine" expert, but I can tell you that the above thought experiment only works if you have complete control of the hardware and software involved in the webpage. Many hosts webpages link to pages of folks hosted by their service. It's a term and condition of service...so it's not nearly as easy to be completely off the search engines as one may think. Beyond that point, for those of us that do "in the wild" research...how would we find your thought experiment if it's not indexed? I guess it would be possible to have a crawler that would randomly generate URLs and check their validity. That might be useful for some research question, but in that case I would assume the unit of analysis would be the URL, at most, and more likely it would be a proof of concept test of some kind - so no human subject would be involved. Now beyond that, I would argue that from a research perspective the blog was still open to study, if it can be found. I say that because the best terrestrial analogy I can think of to your thought experiment is someone who posted a broadsheet on a pole but with a cover over the broadsheet...lots of things could pull that cover off...the wind, rain, or a passing person who didn't like the color of the cover. In short, a person who would go to that much trouble to hide in plan sight...well it's still plan sight. I think that's part of why this "what if" game gets bogus, a person who would make an effort to do the above, isn't all that likely to be "real" and I study real people. "What if's" are valuable in these discussions but again we have to remember that we can dream up far more elaborate scenarios then we are ever likely to see in the wild. > Consider a different scenario: Walking down the street with a friend, > I comment on the fact my rent check bounced, and she offers > condolences. We're in public. We make the utterances loud enough that > someone next to us could easily hear it, but not loud enough that > someone across the street can. Now, this is a public utterance - we > didn't have the conversation behind locked (password-protected) > doors. Can this be archived for research? Better yet, can we setup > microphones to automatically record every conversation uttered in > public? Does the fact these conversations *can* be recorded and > archived mean they, by default, *should be*? I feel we're saying the > same about utterances on the Web - so what's the fundamental > difference from a user perspective between the street and the Web? > Both are a place where we engage in conversations and maintain > relationships.... > > I fear we're confusing what the Internet *is* and *is capable of* > with *how it is used*. Yes, comments left on a personal blog are open > for anyone to see. Yes, discussion board conversations can be > archived. But that's not, I suspect, going through the mind of many > casual users of this technology. It is a medium for communication, > for connecting with people. I leave messages on my neighborhood > parents discussion board because that's how I connect with that > community. I use my real name because I'm among friends. Does that > mean my comments are de facto fair game for any researcher who wants > to scrape the database? Actually I think the "confusion" is at a different level. Your second thought experiment gets at it fairly well. When I am designing research I can only know the "potential" harms, not the actual ones...potentials are before the fact, actuals are retrospective. Let's change your experiment a bit. You are home and in the shower getting ready to meet your friend. You think about the stuff you are going to tell them and you decide to mention your bounced check. And maybe it crosses your mind that you need to be careful where you say that so fewer people over hear. When you decide to tell your friend you don't know who is really around...or what someone who overhears might do with the utterance. You only know that you are going to do your best to make sure that you are careful. Same with research design and human subjects work. We have to learn from actual happenings but if we sit and do statistically, oh my a qualitative researcher just used the s-word, improbable "what-if's" then no research will happen at all. Personally I believe the following - - Research is never risk-free. Neither is life. If you are working toward absolute zero risk in your research you will either give up the pursuit, or build a protocal for your research that lies to you. Yes there are ways to protect YOUR subjects but most of them can "endanger" others in the process (more on this below). Merry Christmas that is not zero risk, it's just minimal risk for the research and probably a heck of a lot of your work that didn't buy anyone more "safety." All of the aforementioned "harm" and "protective" terms were used only as part of the discussion, because what is the real chance of harm from most of our research, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion, one-in-a-trillion? Medical experiments don't get to absolute zero risk...they just shift the potential risk - which may be minimal as well - from the researcher to the patient...unless something unexpected happens and then the risk is back on the researcher. And how do they "know" the potential risks? From computer simulations - based on facts known from old (and often questionable) human experiments, and/or from animal trials. So their "potential" risk knowledge comes from analyzing actual risk after a trial, not from "what if's." - I design research...I predict the potential harm from my "intervention" and I work to minimize the risk ("minimal risk" is the operative term). I do not mind read or assume my position as researcher places me in a superior position and that my subjects need special protections from me. Sorry folks but I truly find that last concept to be pretty funny. I am not injecting people with foreign substances, I look at artifacts they produced and placed online. Personally, I have never had a artifact's author/artist come back to me after I published and complain. I have had a single author question my use of his work without permission - I work with teens remember - and so we talked and by the end of the discussion he understood and told me he was pleased his work was in the paper he just thought he HAD to give permission first. Plus he found out by tracking his visitor logs and finding I had visited repeatedly, so it was not because of an unpleasant experience on his part. Now before I sound like a totally heartless researcher who only sees her subjects as things...when nothing could be further from the truth...if even one of the kids I work with were hurt by my research I would have a crisis of conscience. But again I am not God, I know that if I had done the best job I could do working through my research design and trying to predict all the potential harms likely to happen with my intervention then I have done everything I can do. Some years ago, I wrote a classroom paper that discussed why I don't pseudonymize my subjects in my chatroom research. The simple reason is that there is no way I could come up with nicknames that would cover the participants and not potentially deflect on to another chatroom user. I'm good but I'm not THAT good. So if I did pseudonymize I might protect my participants but in that one-in-a-billion case where someone was in harm's way from something I did...I might well have created the situation rather then hidden it. I'll let you "what if'ers" out there run that one through the filters. Lois

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Re: [Air-L] Public/ Private
by George Floros 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

Jeremy stated > luckily, in science, it doesn't matter if I or you are conscientious, > what matters is that we publish and share our findings. over time, > those findings will either be used and shown useful or not, or > forgotten. > most research on human behaviour is > only reproducible in the abstract and then likely only in statistical > relations. reproducibility as such is not what makes something > science or scientific, or even worthwhile. in fact, i'd argue that > finding a reproducible thing... most of the time has nothing to do > with science per se, but quite alot more to do with organizational > theory, but that's a whole other set of arguments. well then we'll leave at this ; I got a deja-vu feeling from this dialogue, it's eerily reminiscent of the clash between the viewpoints of the 70's and 90's in psychiatric research. I considered some points self-evident because of the historical outcome in my field but I suppose other viewpoints can be useful as well in other fields. I don't have this option where I stand. Nor would I like using this line of thought, come to think of it. George

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Re: [Air-L] public/private
by 'Gail Taylor 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

In following the discussion, I'm not finding distinctions are being made with regard to research that is being conducted in public and private spaces on the Internet. Some researchers are conducting research on web pages that are publically available and password protected. Are you finding that institutions are more tightly regulating research that is being conducted on password protected pages in comparison to others that are publically accessible? Just curious due to a personal interest in the manner in which Internet-based processes are being regulated by business entities, including academic institutions. --------------------------------------- Gail D. Taylor, M.Ed. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Human Resource Education Ph.D. Student Educational Psychology Teaching Assistant Library & Information Science Research Assistant "Technology enables man to gain control over everything except technology." -- Unknown

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Call for Workshop Proposals: GROUP 2008
by Cliff Lampe 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

Apologies for any cross-posting Greetings- The text below announces a workshop at the ACM-GROUP conference that may be of interest to AoIR participants. Scott Counts from Microsoft Research and I are trying to put together a discussion of social computing, specifically bringing together researchers from different fields in this area. We plan to discuss big research issues in social computing, the different homes in which social computing research is being done (and whether more can be done to find a cohesive publication venue), and the interdisciplinary nature of work in this area. ACM-GROUP takes place in lovely Sanibel Island, FL in November. We think those of you interested in the development of "ICT research" as a field would gain from and offer to a lot from this workshop. Hope to see you in Florida! Call for participation: Overview The term social computing is used regularly to describe research projects, technology systems, conference sessions, and even research groups, but what are the research questions and strategies that will help move forward a deep understand of social computing? The commonalities - the causes, effects, and motivations- in the human and technological factors underlying social computing systems are the big issues we are searching for with this workshop. Social psychological processes of online groups, crowd behavior in large online forums, social organization structures in online games, identity and deception in online dating sites, and creating and enforcing norms in media-poor environments are examples of work in this purview. How can we pull together a research effort effective and large scale enough to really address these and similar phenomena? Attempting to identify and define research directions in social computing implies a somewhat larger goal, which is to take a step toward solidifying social computing as a distinct research area, with common methods, theories, and publication outlets. Many researchers are addressing questions in this area, yet often under the rubric of other disciplines. In order to take a step to bring this field into its own, we hope this workshop will begin to address the difficulty in unifying the diversity of people working in the area. Thus, an additional goal for the workshop is to bring together researchers that might not normally interact and may bring very different perspectives, but that nonetheless are studying similar phenomena. Finally, we hope to use this workshop to contribute to a roadmap for more organized research, funding, and publication activities going forward. Proposals Proposals to participate in the workshop should focus on one of the three topic areas below (or combinations thereof). Given the nature of the workshop goals, note that we anticipate a focus on theory and method over system demonstration. 1. A research issue central to the idea of social computing that illustrates how social science theory is embedded in technical systems 2. An area of study critical to ongoing research in social computing 3. A method for studying social computing. Proposals should not focus on an implementation of a system. Attendees will be accepted to the workshop based on 2 page position statements on the meaning of social computing and the research issues they see most cogent to the area, as couched in one or more of the above topic areas. A focus on how the ideas expressed can help establish social computing and carry it forward is encouraged. These position papers will be assembled and distributed to attendees before the conference, with the expectation that readers will read and comment on them before arrival. Position statements and attendee bios will be made available through a groupware application. Each attendee will be expected to comment on at least one other position paper. In addition, we will recruit and present position papers from researchers representative of these fields who were unable to attend the workshop. Using phone and email interviews, we'll query leading researchers in a variety of disciplines on their perspectives on social computing, and make these available through the groupware before the conference begins. Deadlines Deadline for submissions will be September 15. We will screen submissions for quality and relevance to the workshop. Announcements of acceptance will be sent on October 1. The ACM GROUP conference starts on November 4, 2007 (which is the day the workshop takes place). Conference webpage: http://www.acm.org/conferences/group/conferences/group07/ Workshop webpage: http://research.microsoft.com/~counts/group07/

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public/private
by Cameron Adams 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

Edward writes: "if you are chatting in the knowing presence of others, you know who can hear you and you can moderate your volume based on who you want to listen. <snip> so in the case of data collected from the internet . . . did the subject have a reasonable expectation that YOU would be observing them? Did they have the chance to modulate their transmission based on your presence?" I find this very interesting. Clearly, most people will moderate their tone and volume in a coffee shop or other venue where others are around. We can assume that what is easily heard is not "private," or relatively less so than communications made at a volume below the hearing threshold. In web communications, it seems according to this thread, that which is available for millions of people to easily overhear can not be so easily considered to be "public" as the loud bragging of the oaf at the bar (though this can be overheard by only a few people). I do not contest this, but I am curious as to why someone may consider an easily read document (or viewed pictures) to be at all safe from prying eyes. I think there is something fundamental going on here that ought to be investigated. Its not just blogs, but also the phenomenon of recording one's crimes on their phone, which makes prosecution astoundingly easy. What's going on in a broader cultural sense that makes people publicly broadcast, or close to it, what they really intend to be privately held? I just can't believe that there are that many deeply ignorant people out there.... Cheers, Cam

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Search announcement, University of Illinois at Chicago
by Steve Jones 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

The Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago invites applications for the following position: Assistant Professor of Communication. A successful candidate must have interests in the study of new media, the internet, and/or communication technology in combination with the study of one or more of the following areas of department research strength: diversity, health, political, or visual studies. The candidate will also have an earned doctorate in Communication or a related field, strong promise of scholarly achievement and teaching success (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) appropriate for appointment as Assistant Professor, good prospects for external research funding, and demonstrated commitment to multidisciplinary scholarship. Exceptionally strong applicants at the associate professor level may also be considered. Located in the heart of Chicago, UIC is a Research I University with 16,000 undergraduates, 6,500 graduate and 3,000 professional students. The Department of Communication has 11 full-time faculty, approximately 100 undergraduate majors, 25 M.A. students, and 6 Ph.D. students in a doctoral program focused on the relationship between technology and communication. The desired appointment date for the position is August 16, 2008. Interested parties should send a full curriculum vitae, samples of relevant scholarly publications, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and four letters of reference to: Professor Hui-Ching Chang, Chair Communication Search Committee Department of Communication (MC-132) 1007 W. Harrison St. University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL 60607-7137 Applications should be received by October 1, 2007, to receive full consideration, although the search will proceed until the position is filled. The Department expects to conduct interviews at the National Communication Association (NCA) convention in Chicago, November 15– 18, 2007. Women and traditionally under-represented minorities are strongly encouraged to apply. The University of Illinois is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer.

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Re: [Air-L] Public/ Private
by George Floros 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

I said > the devil is in the details. "A living individual" IMHO disqualifies > > imaginary personas and as long as you can't rule them out, you > > write off > > your entire work (even if we talk of just one in a hundred.). > Jeremy responded > I'm not sure I understand where you are going here? I don't need > 'real' people to talk about the things that I need, I just need the > results to be created by either humans or created by something that > human creates. It is perfectly valid, but then I'm not dealing > explicitly with human subjects either. The point is very simple ; unless your results can be traced back to specific individuals then they can't be treated as valid. In an Internet board for example anyone can log in with multiple aliases and publish opinions. Problem is that the researcher can do that too, create multiple imaginary aliases and force his opinion as something "out there". You do need some very real people in order to prove that your work is valid and not something pulled out of a hat. I said > Name one field of research which does not "need" identifiable > > individual > > subjects. I'm not aware of any. > > Jeremy responded > sociology, anthropology, musicology, literary studies, anything that > does not require methodological individualism, which is most fields > of research. Even some topics of research that do no sometimes > require methodological individualism don't require identifiable > subjects. In fact, I'd say those that ''need'' identifiable > individual subjects are probably in the minority in terms of research I can't really see that in any of those examples. All of those fields deal in the study of concrete human cultural output. You seem to confuse the actual quoting of names with the existence of identifiable individuals. You can't just say "we conclude on the basis of our observations that x stands and y doesn't", the natural question by any reader would be "so what or whom did you observe, what was his demographics, for how long did you observe him/her, how many times, etc. ?" You need not identify them on print but you certainly need to have records of their existence and/or records of you spending time in the field doing the observations, or records of which cultural produce you studied (which again implies creators hence individuals with names). Just because you may be a conscientious researcher don't mean everyone else is. The recent example of that Korean guy springs in mind. I don't really think that research w/o those characteristics can even be considered, in principle, reproducible . George

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Re: [Air-L] on the Wayback Machine (was public/private [part 1 of 2])
by Vidar Falkenberg 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

In Denmark, the archiving and preservation of the Danish portion of the internet is done by The State and University Library and the Royal Library. From www.netarchive.dk : "A new legal deposit law came into force on the 1st of July 2005. As a result, The State and University Library and the Royal Library are now collecting and preserving the Danish portion of the internet. In practical terms, this means that the two institutions collect internet-material using so-called "harvesters" (web crawlers). The archive is not publicly accessible and initially can only be used for research purposes and with prior permission from the Danish Data Protection Agency. A set of guidelines regarding the new law has been developed. It outlines the implications of the new law for the national libraries and for websites and content-providers. " The guidelines are in danish only, but the law itself states that setting up a password might not be sufficient to avoid harvesting: "§ 10. The person under the legal deposit obligation must upon demand inform the legal deposit institution about access codes and provide other information etc. necessary for gaining access to the material, produce copies of the material and make the material available to the general public. " http://www.bs.dk/content.aspx?itemguid=%7B332484E6-A5B1-4CEE-B953-059843182… The archive is meant to collect everything made publically available. Examples of material not considered public are closed intranets with a limited set of users like company employees or research groups, or emails and the like aimed at a limited group of persons. The decisive factor between public and private seems to be whether a password is obtainable for all (= public) or by invitation only (= private). Opt-out is not possible, and robots.txt is ignored. Vidar Falkenberg Ph.d.-student Institute of Information and Media Studies University of Aarhus Denmark The Den 14.08.2007 kl. 00:50:10 skrev <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org>: > Do remember that The Wayback Machine is not the only archive...possibly > just the most well known at least to the online research set. Several > libraries are archiving blogs they view as significant, The National > Library of Australia comes to mind here. > > To my knowledge selection for archiving there is opt-out...not that I > know of anyone who has done so...nor do I know what the library would > do if someone said know. Please more info here from anyone in the > know. I do know that those who have been selected have been informed > of the selection...not asked if it was ok for their work to be included. > > Lois Ann Scheidt > > Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana > University, Bloomington IN USA > > Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA > and > IUPUC, Columbus IN USA > > Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com > Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com >

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Literature on Seeding Online Communities
by Lorraine Buis 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

Hello all, I was wondering if anyone is familiar with any academic literature that discusses seeding forums within online communities? By seeding, I mean posting messages from community moderators to get conversations going within online communities. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Laurie Buis Post Doctoral Fellow at Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development Service buisl(a)msu.edu

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