It depends a bit on your discipline, advisor, etc, but if you were my student, I'd advise you to include a brief discussion in your methods section explaining that the quoted material has been left as it was, that it includes 'errors,' and that these 'errors' are part of the culture you are trying to describe, so that "correcting" them would do a disservice to your project in just the ways you describe below. Nancy
Now that I am arriving at the final edit stage of my dissertation on hacktivism, I find myself struggling with an aesthetic and scholarly dilemma. Since so much of my interview material comes from e-mail and IRC exchanges, and much of my additional material comes from site defacements, bulletin boards, etc, the direct quotations in my dissertation are just jammed with typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.
I feel that it would be irritating and condescending to insert a "sic" after every error. But in correcting them I lose some relevant information (like a sense of whether the respondent is a native English speaker) and compromise the accuracy of the quotation. My current compromise is to leave all the errors intact, but to acknowledge the problem in an early footnote. But this seems a bit problematic, too, since all the errors are a bit distracting, and maybe do a disservice to my research subjects. After all, who among us would want our IRC typos preserved for eternity?
I'd love to know how others have handled this. I haven't been able to find any standard for how this should be handled in Internet research.
Thanks,
-- Alexandra Samuel samuel@fas.harvard.edu http://www.alexandrasamuel.com
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-- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org