Monday, 08 February 2010
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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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Welcome to the IRE Digital Library, Resource Center, and Commons

Welcome to the IRE Digital Library, Resource Center, and Commons.   The working knowledge, professional and disciplinary norms and practices, and body of Internet Research Ethics literature, is scattered across disciplines and locales, often contributing to uncertainty in ethical and methodological decision making among researchers and ethics boards which review research in...

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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.