Friday, 30 July 2010
slide

Elizabeth Buchanan on Internet Research Ethics at BITrum Agora

Check out Elizabeth Buchanan on the BITrum Agora blog (a discussion arena of the Science of Information Institute), in an interview conducted by IRE project assitant Anthony Hoffmann.   In the casual interview, Elizabeth briefly discusses her past experiences with Internet research ethics, as well as what makes IRE distinct from research...

Read More..

slide

IRE Project Members to Present at SACHRP

IRE Commons Director Elizabeth Buchanan and Team Member Michael Zimmer will present to the Secretary's Advisory Committee to the Office of Human Research Protections (SACHRP) on July 21, 2010. Elizabeth and Michael will join Montana Miller, Bowling Green University and John Palfrey, Harvard University, to discuss Internet research ethics and...

Read More..

slide

Internet Research Ethics and the Library of Congress Twitter Archive

IRE Project Assistant and UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies PhD student Anthony Hoffmann has posted a four part analysis of the recent Twitter-Library of Congress deal at his blog Sex, Drugs, and Intellectual Freedom.   In parts one through three, he addresses issues as far ranging as privacy/user rights, digital divides and...

Read More..

slide

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...

Read More..

slide

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...

Read More..

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.