[Air-L] Dissertation

[Alex Halavais]

Hi, all,

I already answered Brook in private, but I'll do it in a more public
venue as well, since I've done a little work that looks at blogs, as
have several of my students.

Generally, I consider anything published to the world to be public,
and make the assumption that the person publishing it understands
this. I understand that some bloggers--especially, but not only,
children--do not fully appreciate the potential repercussions of
publishing something publicly. The same could be said, though, of any
form of publishing, and it is a slippery slope to suggest, for
example, that I should have to check with the author of an article
before quoting it.

I think that any blog that requires any sort of log in is off limits,
even if anyone can randomly log in to gain access. I'd be willing to
be challenged on that, but I think of it as a rule of thumb. So, for
example, some MySpace and Livejournal pages are only available to
subscribers (same deal for most social network profiles), and I think
these have to be handled differently.

Anonymizing blogs becomes pretty irrelevant if you include quotations.
I've been pretty surprised to see published articles that seek to
anonymize discussion in pubic forums but then include quotations.
Search engines make such anonymity extremely thin.

I got the impression that some of Brook's research involves surveys or
interviews, which is a different matter--particularly if the results
of those surveys are somehow tied to the public content of the blogs,
since there exists the possibility of making those comments
attributable. But if the content is on the wild wide web, I think it
is fair game.

Alex


On 8/9/07, brook bolander <brookbolander at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Åsa Rosenberg,
>
> Thanks a lot for your informative and interesting e-mail.
>
> You make a good point about the use of quotations, and I will have to
> re-think that aspect, although since my analysis will be linguistic, it will
> be easier to point to uses of linguistic and paralinguistic features,
> without quoting the clauses in which they are found, than in other forms of
> research.
>
> Do I understand you correctly that it is more a matter of ethics, than legal
> issues with regards to the blogger, who has concerns consenting for her
> readers. The way I see it, I can reply to the blogger that she is welcome to
> inform her readers in a post that the blog is being observed for research,
> but that there are no legal problems in her informing me that I may study
> her blog, as long as I anonymize the readers etc.?
>
> Best wishes
> Brook
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