[SIGCIS-Members] how to address ethical privacy issues regarding corpora?

[James Cortada]

Kevin's comments make good sense.  I spent 38 years working at IBM and
confronted privacy issues of this sort quite often.  So my offer: once you
have written your paper, if you are willing to send it to me, I will read
it as if a lawyer in a corporation or one of the protagonists of your
story, to see if there are issues you would want to consider addressing.
My assumption is that there will be no problems, but one must also be both
careful and respectful if involving existing companies and living people.

Regards, Jim Cortada

On Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Kevin Driscoll <kdriscoll at alum.mit.edu>
wrote:

> Hello Alexandre,
>
> I agree that the public accessibility of this listserv does not obviate
> your ethical obligation to its participants. But I also agree that the
> professional status of various participants will likely be a critical
> variable for your analysis and needn't be tossed out altogether. In my
> experience, there is often a middle path between total disclosure and total
> anonymity that will require a bit of extra creativity in how you write up
> your research. For example, paraphrasing is often enough to convey the
> content of what someone is saying without giving malicious readers an
> easily googleable phrase.
>
> The critical question involves thinking through the potential harms that
> may come to listserv participants as a consequence of your research.
> Fortunately, this is precisely the type of question that has motivated the
> Association of Internet Researchers Ethics Committee for the last 10+ years
> and their 2012 guidelines offer a nice model for thinking about research
> involving online communities, see: http://aoir.org/ethics/
>
> Best of luck with your project,
> Kevin Driscoll
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 11:28 AM, Alexandre Hocquet <
> alexandre.hocquet at univ-lorraine.fr> wrote:
>
>> Dear list members,
>>
>> We are in the process of submitting a manuscript of a paper within which
>> we use, as our corpus, the archives of a mailing list (namely the
>> Computational Chemistry List, http://www.ccl.net/). Some results of this
>> work on this corpus have been presented at SHOT 2012 in Copenhagen (
>> http://www.sigcis.org/workshop12/Hocquet) for those who remember (and
>> yes, this is very slow science).
>>
>> This kind of corpus raises the issue of unveiling identities and
>> quotations of the mailing list posters in the manuscript. Even though the
>> archives of the list are publicly accessible on the web, and even though
>> the posters did sign a disclaimer when posting to the list, our question is
>> whether, and to what extent, it could be considered unethical, regarding
>> publication in an academic journal, to disclose their identities.
>>
>> A radical solution to preserve posters privacy could be to anonymize the
>> identities and quotations of the mailing list posters. But we believe that
>> the details of the background, status, opinions, worldviews... of the
>> actors are of prime interest for our discussion of their debates within the
>> mailing list. Our concern is thus to respect the privacy of posters without
>> losing useful sociological details in the process.
>>
>> For example, we believe it is a useful information in the dynamics of the
>> debates in the corpus that a poster has a specific academic position, is
>> involved or not in the founding of an entrepreneurial structure, what is
>> their role in the developing of specific software packages....which even
>> raises the issue of privacy of pieces of software as well as humans...
>>
>> As we have never been confronted to this issue in our previous
>> manuscripts, we are in need of ethical guidelines, or, even more helpful,
>> pieces of advice on our specific case study. Thank you in advance for your
>> answers.
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> --
>> ***********************************************
>> Alexandre Hocquet
>>
>> Université de Lorraine & Archives Henri Poincaré
>> Alexandre.Hocquet at univ-lorraine.fr
>> http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet
>> ***********************************************
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>
>
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-- 
James W. Cortada
Senior Research Fellow
Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota
jcortada at umn.edu
608-274-6382
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