Thursday, December 03, 2009

Digital Ethical Dilemmas

Gesa Kirsch's _Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research_ brought us the term "ethical dilemmas" earlier in the semester. Those moments/challenges researchers face where they are faced with a knotty problem of "what to do" in a situation involving a participant and questions of representation, participation, and ethics.

Some of the ethical dilemmas and/or challenges to method we are seeing in this week's readings;

--how to deal with the fact that virtual communities (if they are open) can be studied without the participants even knowing there is a researcher present or that the researcher is deploying "publicly" available information. The big question here is what is private and what is public. As this collection points out, many online writers see themselves as writing to a private audience or partially private audience when the work they produce is fully and publicly available.


--This raises the question of how to participate in a community in which you are a researcher? And what do you do when you are already a participant and decide to study a community? Do you announce your new status? How do you negotiate the interpersonal relations and questions of trust and proximity that such a move makes?

--How to involve participants in the study--there are a number of strategies mentioned in the article by DePew on triangulating data. DePew wants us to consider how we might move beyond textual analysis and complicate our understandings through interviews and other kinds of actions. Scott Dewitt had participants give him virtual tours of their websites as a way of seeing how they interpreted their web work and also a way to include them in the process of interpreting their texts.

--That online communities are not necessarily face-to-face (although they can be) in the way that other communities are changes the relationship. So there can be an element of play and mythification in the circulation of representations online. So how to sort through and interpret that is a dilemma. That is where the triangulation that DePew calls for can come in as a way to understand what might be going on. But this raises questions as well about intentionality, and DePew gets into that as well as a problem.

--The other piece of this is what one can find out online about particular individuals or groups. Sidler discusses the role of the online researcher studying scientific communities as that of the "scavenger." As she points out, the "scavenger" is looking at multiple sources and sometimes discovers in the online meeting rooms or spaces that she is confronted with "too much information" (77). What do we do with that information? How does knowing "too much" affect the way we address the other information we are privy to in our research.

--"Digital artifacts pose interesting coding-related issues b/c they are less stable than print artifacts, alter relations between creator and audience, and can incorporate multiple media" (Blythe 203). This happens all the time for many of us who teach. A student consults a web-based resource. He/she goes back later to work with it again, and it is gone. Sure, there are online archives, but this is essentially a set of materials that have been pulled from "view." So what to do about that? If it's an archive where there has been no permission, what should the researcher do?

These are samples of the kinds of dilemmas posed by the authors in _Digital Writing Research_ that I hope we can work with some today. I wonder, too, how we address such dilemmas in our own research, but also as we teach students to engage in digital research as well.

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