Preconference workshop: Technology / Research / Ethics
AoIR 4.0
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 – 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Charles
Ess, Organizer / Moderator
[For more information, please email! <chess@it-c.edu>]
[$50.00 registration fee:
proceeds support AoIR 4.0]
The following workshop brings together both ethics working committee members and nationally-recognized scholars who have significantly contributed to the discussion and development of Internet research ethics.
The workshop is designed to
utilize the AoIR ethics statement as a starting point for discussion;
push forward our consideration of the ethical issues surrounding Internet research, as we consider new case studies and technologies introduced by both presenters and participants - and from a variety of disciplinary and cultural perspectives; and
provide AoIR members and conference participants an environment in which to discuss their own experiences and cases of ethical problems encountered in their research - and in a dialogical environment that includes some of the best resource persons for such discussion (i.e., both experienced researchers and ethicists familiar with these issues).
The proposed workshop thus meets one of the charges of the ethics working group - i.e., to provide AoIR members with resources and assistance in dealing with ethical issues. Such resources and assistance are crucial, especially in light of the rapidly changing and often multi-cultural environments of online research. In light of the increasing awareness of and interest in Internet research ethics, coupled with the range of disciplines and perspectives represented by the facilitators, we believe that the workshop will very likely be of interest to a significant number of those considering attending AoIR 4.0.
Workshop presentations/schedule (ca. 20 minutes each, with 5-10 minutes for immediate questions and discussion):
8:30 a.m.:. Welcome, opening remarks - Charles Ess
8:45 - 9:15: Elizabeth Buchanan (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; editor of Readings in Virtual Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies, forthcoming)
Elizabeth Buchanan will discuss the role of Institutional Review Boards and Internet research ethics. How should such boards respond to the novelty of Internet research ethics? What guidelines must be in place to assist boards in reviewing protocols dealing with online research? Buchanan will discuss her experiences in educating her university's IRB, in drafting university policy for online research, and will highlight specific ethical difficulties with protocols wanting to conduct online research.
9:15 - 9:45: Jeremy Hunsinger (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University)
Jeremy Hunsinger will describe three advanced technologies that can be used to gather research data on the Internet. I will briefly outline some of their primary uses and then discuss some of the areas where they can cause problems pursuing ethical Internet research. By examining how these technologies push a variety of boundaries of ethical research we can come to terms with interesting examples of negotiating Internet research problems which then should provide for lively discussion for a small group. Tentatively the three technologies I propose to introduce for discussion are "Advanced Content Analysis Systems", "Internet Traffic Capture Devices", and "Modified Web Browsing Environments for Data Capture". Complete descriptions of the three technologies will be provided with examples before the conference.
9:45 - 10:00 -- Break
10:00 - 10:30: Keren Rice (Social Science and Humanities Working Committee, Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics, Canada)
Keren Rice will review the mandate of the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics, and the role of the Social Science and Humanities Working Committee. She will then examine the issues that have arisen with respect to Internet research – including anonymity, consent, and participation of the researcher – and introduce some case studies.
10:30 - 11:00: Michele White (Wellesley College)
Michele White will discuss how humanities methodologies generate critical questions and provide particular challenges to Internet research ethics as it is/was understood, with initial (but not exclusive) reference to the AoIR document. She will describe some of the ethical models articulated in humanities disciplines and the different concerns that these suggest, including the ethics/politics conflict in some Internet-related humanities disciplines. She is especially interest in how visual culture, which includes the Internet as one of its key sites of analysis, is articulating itself as contrarily subject specific and a politicization of the humanities. This leads to a consideration of the politics of Internet research ethics - who can be made real, visual, and articulated; how does the money/power of academic internet studies get distributed; what happens to the disciplines that are deemed less related to internet research, etc.?
Workshop/Discussion Sessions: 11:00 - 12:30
Workshop participants are encouraged to bring their own ethical case-studies for discussion with workshop presenters and other participants in small groups following the formal presentations.
These discussions will be facilitated by the presenters, as well as by
Leslie Tkach Kawasaki (University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan, and member of the AoIR ethics working group)
Klaus Bruhn Jensen (University of Copenhagen, and member of the AoIR ethics working group)
At approximately 12:00 noon, we will reconvene the groups for a final reporting in and concluding discussion
Resources
In addition to the AoIR guidelines (approved by the AoIR membership, November, 2002), workshop participants will have access to the most recent publications and developments in online research ethics, including:
We hope that Elizabeth Buchanan’s volume, Readings in Virtual Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2003), which includes portions of the AoIR Guidelines, will be available.
By the same token, the volume
Sarina Chen and Jon Hall (eds.), Online Social Research: Methods, Issues, and Ethics. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
should be available – and is also the topic of a panel at AoIR 4.0.
May Thorseth (ed.), Applied Ethics (with)in the field of Internet Research. Trondheim, Norway: Programme for Applied Ethics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2003.
This volume grew out of the Nordic Conference and graduate course on Internet research ethics held in June, 2002, at NTNU. The first section of the book is made up of contributions by the conference speakers and serves as an introduction to the field of Internet research ethics:
Dag Elgesem, "On the parallel between the norms of science and the norms of cultures on the Internet"
Charles Ess, "Beyond Contemptus Mundi and Cartesian Dualism: the BodySubject, (re)New(ed) Coherencies with Eastern Approaches to Life/Death, and Internet Research Ethics"
Chris Mann, "Generating data online: ethical concerns and challenges for the C21 researcher"
Annette N. Markham, "Critical Junctures and Ethical Choices in Internet Ethnography"
The volume further includes graduate student research projects –both more theoretical and highly focused / practical ethical essays regarding specific research projects as case studies, thus providing a rich range of examples for discussion.
Lessons and questions from the RESPECT project.
This project seeks to build a set of ethical guidelines for “socio-economic” research within the European Research Area (as established and funded by the European Union – specifically, under the European Commission’s information Society Technologies (IST) Programme). In particular, the project seeks to establish codes for:
Professional Conduct in Socio-Economic Research
Data Protection
Conducting Ethical Socio-Economic Research
Professional (Behavior), and
Intellectual Property Rights
See <http://www.respectproject.org/main/index.php> for a description of the project, links to the guidelines in their current form, and other important resources. (Because of my involvement with the AoIR ethics working committee and guidelines development, I was invited to comment on the current draft guidelines as part of the RESPECT conference in Budapest, June 11-12, 2003.)
Conference presentations available from the RESPECT Project website. While a number of the presentations on the RESPECT website will be of interest, I would especially call attention to the following:
Conducting European socio-economic research: which competencies are needed? Ellen Schryvers and Tom Vandenbrande, HIVA
International and Intercultural Competencies in Vocational Contexts: What is it and how to teach and learn it? (Educational requirements for interdisciplinary, cross-cultural socio-economic research.) Holger Reinisch, University of Jena
The National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH – Norway) 2001 “Guidelines for research ethics in the social sciences, law and the humanities,” <http://www.etikkom.no/NESH/guidelines.htm>, are currently under revision – with a specific “unit” devoted to Internet research ethics. I hope to have an English translation available for the workshop.
Finally, with the extensive help of the senior researcher involved,
I have developed an anonymized case study based on this researcher’s experiences
with a local IRB last spring, one that raises two central questions:
Does a Subject’s Discovering Unauthorized Recording Amount to Harm?
Who is Responsible for Remedying Real and Potential Harms that Emerge in Research?
Report
The workshop will generate a great deal of material that will be of use not only to the ethics working committee, but also to the AoIR membership at large. Given appropriate permissions from presenters and discussants, I will collate for subsequent review and discussion - perhaps as part of the ethics working committee website (but available publicly) - presentation materials, case-studies, and discussion notes.