[Air-L] Researchers as new eyes on public data

[Ed Lamoureux]

Gilbert
" journalists, politicians, preachers, bloggers,"  are NOT social  
scientific researchers responsible to that institutionalized ethic.  
They don't promise their universities (and the government and society  
in general) to protect human subjects. You are right, they can do  
anything they darn well please (within the confines of the ethics of  
their genre). We cannot. We promise to do better. And when we don't,  
we compromise the ability of future researchers to get willing  
subjects. We live and work in the speech act game called "social  
science research." It is bound by constraints that don't exit in some  
other language games.


On Sep 3, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Gilbert B. Rodman wrote:

> Sure, Ed ... but that doesn't get at Lois' question about what (if
> anything) is *uniquely* dangerous about researchers in this  
> regard.  The
> very same processes of interpreting, labeling, repackaging, and
> redistributing, after all, are routinely used by journalists,
> politicians, preachers, bloggers, and then some.  And, given the large
> discrepancies in audience size between, say, CNN and _New media and
> society_, any legitimate fears of possible "repackaging" are probably
> better directed at the "repackagers" who reach tens of millions of
> people (on a bad day), rather than the ones who reach hundreds (on a
> good one).
>
ard Lee Lamoureux, Ph. D.
Associate Professor, Multimedia Program
and Department of Communication
Co-Director, New Media Center
1501 W. Bradley
Bradley University
Peoria IL  61625
309-677-2378
<http://slane.bradley.edu/com/faculty/lamoureux/website2/index.html>
<http://gcc.bradley.edu/mm/>
AIM/IM & skype: dredleelam
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