Hello there are also other things to keep in mind: for both ethical and legal purposes. For example there is the notion of geographic singularities: If in a certain geographical area there are only one, or a few, points (for example geo referenced tweets or instagram posts) it could be fairly easy to identify them even if their nicknames had been anonymized. In this case further levels of anonymization would be needed. (or even getting rid of the items) In any case: there is a wealth of cases in which the content alone, or its context, make it easy to identify the subject, even if anonymized. These require more complex actions to preserve people's rights. cheers! Salvatore ᐧ On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Maurice Vergeer <m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
If you do qualitative research and e.g. cite tweets, it's useless to anonymize (as Michael states). If you do quantitative research the findings will be so abstract that individual users will be hard to trace, but not impossible depending on the number of variables and the number of userhandles.
Still, anonymizing is fairly easy when you have the data in a statistical program such as SPSS, R or even Excel: replace the userhandles with a unique number (from 1 to N). Then remove the userhandles from the dataset. Still I would advice always to keep a secure file with both keyvariables userhandles and the new identifyer for future resrearch.
Hope this helps. Maurice
On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 5:11 AM, Ye Na Lee <jpt2007@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Dear subscribers to Association of Internet Researchers, I am currently going through IRB process for a research on Twitter data and I was told to anonymize Twitter handles completely. Are there any online programs with which I could anonymize usernames? I don`t think I should create fake Twitter handles for every single tweet that I quote on my paper. I`d really appreciate any suggestions on anonymizing Twitter handles! Thank you in advance! _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/ listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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