[Air-L] Online research ethics

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

>
Well yes and no, then the question becomes one of what you are saying  
about what.  This is a slippery slope because one can always argue  
that if the creator of something is still alive... you are studying  
people and I think we should explicitly avoid implication that  
studying people makes any given individual a research subject.   There  
are a myriad of ways of studying people without fitting the  
description of a research subject in the u.s. guidelines (which is not  
as rich and  plural as many humanist might wish, but ehh....).  The  
situation in the u.s. as i've read it makes people a subject when you  
intervene, when you invade privacy, or when you might risk harm (harm  
in a way that is substantially more and different from the everyday.)

I do agree that if you aren't sure whether you are subject to irb  
approval, you should get irb approval.   But I don't think we should  
argue that studying blogs archived on the web and making inferences  
from their produced textual materials about bloggers in general is   
any different than when i study books and publications in order to  
make inferences about the operations of academia.  Now, if i were to  
study a blog to understand one person's life that might be an issue,  
and it would depend signficantly on the methods you undertake as to  
where my opinion would lie.

>
> If you are studying the site(s) as texts without consideration to the
> issues of the people who wrote the words, placed the pictures,
> etc....then I think you can use the text argument.  HOWEVER, if you  
> are
> using the words or pictures or whatever, on the screen to get at  
> issues
> related to the content creators then you are studying people.  PERIOD.