Saturday, 13 March 2010
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Call for Papers: Special Issue of the International Journal of Internet Research Ethics

The International Journal of Internet Research Ethics (IJIRE) seeks papers from researchers describing best ethical practices in the investigation of online communities. This special issue, edited by Aleks Krotoski, aims to create a compendium of case studies and theoretical frameworks which future scholars will reference when designing their own analyses...

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Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent?

IRE project member Michael Zimmer has started a conversation at his blog on the question "Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent?":   While participating in the workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research, the question arose as to whether it was...

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Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research

IRE project member Michael Zimmer is participating in a workshop on Revisiting Research Ethics in the Facebook Era: Challenges in Emerging CSCW Research at CSCW 2010. He is presenting submitted a brief analysis of his ethical critique of the “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset release: Subject Privacy and the...

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Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Resource Center and Commons

What is IRE?

Internet Research Ethics (IRE) is an emerging cross-disciplinary field which studies how research is conducted in online environments and seeks to resolve the subsequent ethical dilemmas in normative and practical terms. While similar to its physical counterpart, conducting scholarly research online is different in terms of ethics and values. For example, online surveys bring new privacy concerns. Research in chat rooms confound our notions of subject anonymity and identifiability. Scraping data from social networks or public blogs complicate issues of informed consent.

 

Pressing Need

Research conducted on and through the Internet has expanded exponentially in the last ten years; researchers across disciplines make frequent use of such tools as online survey generators, as well as engage in forms of participant observations of virtual worlds.