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.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Going digital

It's that time of the semester when I find myself doing things like starting a facebook group for people who want to run or walk 100 miles in 30 days. OK, so I'm in a manic phase right now. It happens every year! The most "wonderful time of the year" is also the most challenging time of the year for all of us who are academics with project deadlines and grading to do, etc. My response is to take the excess energy generated and run and (walk) 100 miles. So.....

This week's readings in 691 are really useful. I'm glad we are ending our spate of reading for 91 with the collection _Digital Writing Research_. I think the framing of this project by McKee and DeVoss is really important. Their introduction is extremely useful, and I found Porter's preface helpful as well. I like that Porter does not let readers off the hook--he demands that the digital be given its due inside the field and outside as well. I will do some hopping and skipping around to try to touch on some key points.

I also want to point out that as we search for an Asst Professor in composition that Porter's preface to the book reminded me of all that the terms and expectations that composition carries with it and also how that is shifting:

"The term 'composition' signifies our particular interest in composing processes and also our affiliation with composition studies; it identifies what has long been a primary research locale for the field--the first-year college composition course. But the shift to he word 'writing' (which has been happening for some time now) reflects more accurately what our field has actually been doing: examining writing practices across numerous academic, public, and professional spaces, not just college classrooms. The ambiguity of the term 'writing' is also an advantage: it could refer to the text itself, or tot he process of creating the text" (xviii).

He goes on to point out that writing is an "action." We write to" do something." So the field's research explores all of these dimensions. Then he goes on to discuss the shift that "digital" brings, a "dramatic shift from the analog and print world to a new kind of writing space altogether" (xviii).

What is included in the digital:
"computer mediated technology" but also "technology--as cultural space" and as "technology-as production-space" (xviii). Porter wants readers to think beyond technology as a "tool," which is the language that is deployed far too often when describing digital work.

McKee and DeVoss in their introduction lay out a definition of digital writing research that demonstrates the array of spaces and actions that are being referred to:
1) "computer-generated, computer-based, and/or computer-delivered documents;
2) computer-based text production practices" (text is referred to broadly and includes a variety of artifacts;
3) "the interactions of people using digital technologies (communities and spaces)" (3).

These venues incite us to think through the methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas (Kirsch) that we might face Their list of eight bulleted sets of questions on p. 4 are particularly insightful. I find myself trying to answer each question in light of the rest of the book.

I'll have more to say, but this is a start for now to get me into the swim of laying out some of the conceptual shifts and methodological challenges this book is posing.

What strikes me as I reread the essays for this week is how much our field has made some of these questions invisible as well as visible. What have we taken for granted as we "move around" in digital spaces and yet don't always account for those spaces as spaces?

We've spent a lot of time talking about communities and concerns about research ethics? But how do digital communities pose similar and different challenges?