Most tend to focus on evaluating biomedical studies or traditional, survey-based social science. And the committees set up to protect research subjects-institutional review boards, or IRB’s-lack experience with Web-based research, Mr. Researchers must navigate the shifting privacy standards of social networks and their users. “That’s like a social scientist’s wet dream, right? And here it has kind of fallen on our lap, these ephemeral recordings that we would not have otherwise gotten.”īut that boon brings new pitfalls. “If you had to dream of research content, it would be sending out a diary and having people record their thoughts at the moment,” says Alex Halavais, an associate professor of communications at Quinnipiac University and soon-to-be president of the Association of Internet Researchers. The daily minutiae of our digital lives are so culturally valuable that the Library of Congress is on the eve of opening a research archive of public tweets. The controversy over the Harvard data set, known as “Tastes, Ties, and Time,” comes amid growing interest in social-network research across disciplines, including sociology, communications, history, geography, linguistics, business, computer science, and psychology. “It just shows that we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we’re doing this kind of research correctly and in ways that don’t jeopardize the subjects that we’re studying.” Zimmer, an assistant professor at Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies and co-director of its Center for Information Policy Research. “The steps that they tried to take to engage in innovative research, to me fell short,” says Mr. Kaufman and his colleagues could be cracked to identify the source as Harvard undergraduates. The Facebook project began to unravel in 2008, when a privacy scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Michael Zimmer, showed that the “anonymous” data of Mr. Kaufman are being asked to safeguard privacy in an era when grant-making agencies increasingly request that data be shared-as the National Science Foundation did as a condition for backing Harvard’s Facebook study. Kaufman accuses his critics of acting like “academic paparazzi.”Īdding to the complications, researchers like Mr. No student seems to have suffered any harm. Jason Kaufman, the project’s principal investigator and a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, points out that data were redacted to minimize the risk of identification. The Harvard sociologists argue that the data pulled from students’ Facebook profiles could lead to great scientific benefits, and that substantial efforts have been made to protect the students. The story of that collapse shines a light on emerging ethical challenges faced by scholars researching social networks and other online environments. Those students have been identified as Harvard College’s Class of 2009. The Facebook archive is more like plutonium than gold-its contents yanked offline, its future release uncertain, its creators scolded by some scholars for downloading the profiles without students’ knowledge and for failing to protect their privacy. And in 2008, the Harvard team began to realize that potential by publicly releasing part of its archive.īut today the data-sharing venture has collapsed. It was the kind of collection that hundreds of scholars would find interesting. The source: some 1,700 Facebook profiles, downloaded from an entire class of students at an “anonymous” university, that could reveal how friendships and interests evolve over time. In 2006, Harvard sociologists struck a mother lode of social-science data, offering a new way to answer big questions about how race and cultural tastes affect relationships.
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