[Air-L] public/private

[Joseph Reagle]

As an aside, I confronted this issue of public/private myself in my 
dissertation proposal and IRB application:
  http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/disp/proposal.html#heading27
This was difficult for me because I find it difficult to strictly place my 
work in a particular discipline. That is, I feel myself to be much closer 
to a historian than a sociologist, but many of my sources are still 
presently alive. I think in the case of Wikipedia I do benefit from the 
fact that there are both explicit (e.g., privacy policies) and implicit 
(e.g., the wiki culture, a great deal of interest) markers of the public 
character of wiki actions and discourse.

But, to consider another case. There are a number of prominent intellectuals 
criticizing Wikipedia in one form or another, often publishing on their 
blogs; these might not have the same explicit privacy policies -- this is 
not surprising as the blog and blogging is under the direct control the 
person. I also, reasonably IMHO, treat these as publications and available 
for comment by me. Indeed, there is an expectation of response and 
argumentation. Could it be possible that in comparing criticism of 
Wikipedia with that that occurred in 1968 around the publication of 
Merriam-Webster's Third Edition one of these critics might not like how I 
characterize their position? Yes. But they publish that position in public, 
under a chosen identity, and to require a consent form to engage the 
arguments of prominent journalists or librarians seems, again IMHO, 
ridiculous. 

Even to speak with them, or to speak to other important folks about the 
historical record of electronic encyclopedic reference works, under a 
consent form seems inappropriate and not something most historians 
practice -- though they do of course have their own ethics and practices. 
However, so as to move my dissertation proposal forward, this is one of the 
concessions I made: subsequent nonpublic conversations that I use as a 
source in my work will be covered by a consent form. Note here, another 
caveat. I might have nonpublic conversations with people, that I do not 
use, and are not covered by a consent form. Because of my topic, Wikipedia, 
I actually think it would be impossible to not go about my daily life and 
not speak, or even just hear, something about Wikipedia. Once when I was in 
the elevator, I heard two other people speaking about Wikipedia, perhaps 
this influenced me in some way -- though of course I'm not citing this 
conversation in my dissertation -- and I mused to myself that under the 
consent-maximalist position I would have to either put my fingers in my 
ears, or ask them to stop until they sign a consent form.

In the end, this is why I found AoIR Ethics Working Committee  "questions to 
ask when undertaking Internet research" (Ess et al. 2002) to be useful. 
There are a number of factors that the researcher, regardless of 
discipline, should consider (e.g., venue, expectations, participants, type 
of content, sensitivity, etc.). But I think it is inappropriate to have 
every single type of study which might involve a human evaluated in a 
binary fashion as if it were a psychological or medical study.
-- 
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E