My good friend Jeremy has even taken the position that the people that produce these texts aren't even subjects. I'm sorry, but I just don't agree.
They are 'subjects' just not the type of subject defined by human subject research, which as I've said several times is clear, a subject is someone you intervene with or someone whose private information you have. that is what the fed says they are. THat does not mean that they are not ethical subjects or that we do not have certain responsibilities of care in our research, it just means that for the terms of human subjects review, studying texts is not studying human subjects.
Granted, people who post (many of whom are minors) do subject themselves to the dangers of making their private information widely available to others. But to just say that it's all out there so there aren't any rules, is, in my view, drastically wrong. I believe that some of the rules DO apply. And even if they don't I think that we should follow ethical guidelines that are MORE concerned about protecting human subjects than we are about furthering our own research agenda.
that is the fundamental issue, it is not that we are protecting the subjects, this is not an absolutist regime, it is a utilitarian regime we are balancing the risks against the rewards. There are always risks and there are always rewards (we hope), if the risk is small, or the risk created by the research is not new or increased substantively from the old, then... the research outweighs the risk. but to be clear, this is not a system that says 'thou shalt do no harm', it is a system that says 'harm must be weighed'.
Two other points. This list serves a lot of people like you . . . graduate students looking for direction. In fact, this thread was started by a grad student asking for advice/direction. What's a faculty member to do? Ignore possible issues and just say "OK KID, GO FOR IT!" even when and if they think there are issues to be discussed? We were asked our opinion about these considerations. Both sides of the issue have been represented and discussed. I think that's healthy.
It is healthy until inapplicable positions are voiced, then we have issues.
That's why stuff like this is often called a "contested issue." Just because one side says that it's a done deal, doesn't always make it so (not even my side). That's why I shared the U of Ill. procedure document. That wasn't my argument (though I used it) . . . those are procedures used by a fairly enlightened IRB. I think those procedures would apply to a lot of the web-netted research that's been discussed here. Other folks don't think so. Ok.
Second, some of us are the same faculty who will go into our classes and preach hour after hour to our students about the public loss of privacy in America . . all the time cautioning our students (let alone our children) about the dangers of over-exposing private information. Or at least, I should say, I do.
I think those that preach this do not really grasp the nature of privacy in america, as 'there is none or at least there is very little possibility of privacy in the classical european sense of the privacy of the individual and family' To stipulate that we have a real sense of privacy is in my mind to be nostalgic for a fiction that can be shown mostly to be a fiction by the telling of minoritarian narratives in opposition of the grand narratives of us having privacy. I don't think the schizoid nature of the faculty can be the argument. We all do plenty of things every day that are antagonistic to our claimed beliefs. We also recognize, usually, that what we teach our students might not be the way things are or were, but the way things have been presented, and that they are presented differently to students differently at different levels of expertise. I'd expect that most of my students, much like I have, have signed away about 99% of their privacy, heck I don't even have control of my own genome, gave that to the government years ago:), other privacies are pretty much gone too, insurance companies, finance companies, etc. etc. Is there a normative 'should not' in giving up 'privacy'? there would be... if it ever really existed as we imagine it did, but then I don't think it existed like that either. I just look at union busting, the red scare, black listing, and worse things that were predicated on the public knowledge of the supposed private, and I just don't see the empirical basis for a strong sense of privacy. I see the legal foundations in the u.s., but others can comment on them better than I can.
Then are we the very same faculty that turn around and grab whatever we can find from that netted-web without regard for protecting the very humans who produced the texts we want to study? That doesn't strike me as right, somehow.
There are plenty of people who drive cars and preach environmentalism... there are plenty of people who have glorious health insurance and vote against universal healthcare. having a unified system of judgment is another metanarrative fiction, usually tied to the unified subject of the enlightenment. If you can find a person that does not have conflicting beliefs and operates in one unified belief system, I'm pretty sure that you've found an Angel.
I'm sorry if I sound intransigent. I'm really not. I've often made applications to IRBs with all sorts of efforts to finesse various strictures, for various reasons. But I know, for example, that when Linden Lab took down their TOS restrictions to and procedures for research in Second Life, they explicitly offered the idea that they expected that the oversight provided to researchers by their local IRB would suffice. But for that to happen, applications to do the work, to get the exemption, must be filed. If the faculty member says, instead, "Oh, I know this is ok," then no oversight occurs.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes applying to the irb is appropriate, and if you have concerns, you surely should. however, in terms of textual analysis, i likely would not. However, before I decided to not apply, I would talk with other people in my department, like the department head first, to make sure that everyone knew what i was doing and shared my judgment. Remember my advice to the graduate student a while ago. Check your local community first, check with the people you are citing, etc.
I honestly DO NOT have an axe to grind over this. I DO happen to think that open discussion of issues such as these are important. I also think that the internet is a fuzzy enough business that the answers are not fixed or obvious or universal. I am sorry if I seemed stubborn. I too, will quit now as I've made the key points I want to make and repeating them just wastes valuable bits and bandwidth.
I love wasting bandwidth, of course... I'm borrowing this from the cafe next door because my dsl is not installed yet. i think it is important to hear all sides here, but I also think we have to be very wary of the tendency to give up our own ethical judgments to a review board. jeremy hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu) wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series