[Air-L] Including screennames with tweets

[Aysenur Ataman]

Dear Becky,

I believe it is important to define Twitter as an online public space if your unit of analysis is publicly available tweets at one point in time.

In that case, similar rules of reporting the research findings that employs naturalistic observation (or ethnography) can be used in reporting research findings based on public records. Twitter users are technically not research participants as research participants, by definition, are people who voluntarily consented to take part in a research procedure. However, a social scientist can observe the use of a public space without receiving consent from people and using any identifiers in their reports. In fact, using identifying information on people using the space are strictly prohibited in observational research.

I suspect you are looking at patterns of similarities and differences based on many records of data. Frankly, I do not see how often it would be necessary to quote a tweet in a published piece. One technique ethnographers have been using to deal with anonymity is having a personal data set that anonymizes identifying information (e.g. name) with pseudo names. Perhaps that old technique can become handy in Twitter context as well.

Best,
Ayşenur

---------------------------------------------------
Ayşenur Benevento

Ph.D. Candidate in Developmental Psychology
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Research Associate with Children’s Environment Research Group<http://cergnyc.org/>

www.aysenurbenevento.com<http://www.aysenurataman.com>






On Jul 13, 2018, at 11:41 AM, Theo Plothe <tp6316a at student.american.edu<mailto:tp6316a at student.american.edu>> wrote:

Twitter is a public forum in the public sphere. There is no expectation of
anonymity on speech in that regard. Having published a few pieces on
Twitter including a book chapter just a few weeks ago, I have never failed
to publish the screennames on the se accounts. The only reason not to
include tweets is if the tweets are from a protected account, which is of
course is not part of the public timeline.

Best,
Theo
_______________________________________________
The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org<mailto:Air-L at listserv.aoir.org> mailing list
is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
http://www.aoir.org/