Tag Archives: anonymity

June 27, 2013 | 6 Comments

Onymous, pseudonymous, neither or both?


Heather Ford

Heather Ford

Editor’s Note: For our Virtual Identity edition, contributing editor Heather Ford (@hfordsa) explores the complications of attribution and identification in online research. Are members of online communities research subjects, research participants, amateur artists? When is online participation public, private, or something in between?

_________________________________________________

Pic by moriza on Flickr, CC BY NC SA

Pic by moriza on Flickr, CC BY NC SA

When I published one of my first studies of online communities as part of my master’s research, I came up against one of the most challenging aspects of online research: how to reflect the identity of one’s research participants. I had been observing an open educational content community and quoted one of the participants’ missives from the publicly available mailing list without referring to his name or username. I had thought that this was the right thing to do: to anonymize the data, thus protecting the subjects. But the “subject” was angry that he had been quoted “without attribution”. And he was right. If I was really interested in protecting the privacy of my subjects, why would I quote his sentence when anyone could probably Google it and find out who wrote it.

Since then, my process has evolved a lot, but I still send my research participants a draft of my paper before it gets published so that they can choose whether I a) anonymize their statements b) attribute according to their usernames or c) attribute their full (“real”) names. But the process becomes unwieldy when doing detailed content analysis (or “trace ethnography” as per Geiger and Ribes) on Wikipedia where only some editors accept email and where other editors may have left the project. These are publicly available statements on a website that is explicitly open for copying and remixing, but I’m also taking those statements out of the context in which they are written. This is technically a “remix” but may make some editors uncomfortable.

So, do I quote users and attribute their comments to their username on publicly accessible websites like Wikipedia? Or do I need to get their written permission where they choose whether they want me to attribute their name, username, both or neither?Read More… Onymous, pseudonymous, neither or both?

June 16, 2013 | 4 Comments

Virtual identity: Subversive attention


Related posts:

Eddie Vedder, Damien Echols

Eddie Vedder embraces Damien Echols
(CC BY-SA CarolinaaPPaz)

While working on this month’s edition on virtual identity, I’ve been reading Life After Death, Damien Echols’ memoir of a ruptured life. At 18, Echols was convicted along with two other men of the murders of three children, allegedly in a Satanic ritual.

It wasn’t until 2011, after Echols had spent 18 years facing execution on Death Row, that he and the other two members of the “West Memphis Three” were released in the wake of new DNA evidence and critical media attention. The prosecution’s case had rested on coercive confessions and unfounded fears about the involvement of local heavy metal enthusiasts in Satanic orgies. Thus it seems that one horror — the murder of three innocent second graders — was followed by another, in which three teenagers were convicted of those murders based on little more than the crime of liking Metallica [1]. Unfortunately stories like Echols’ aren’t that surprising.

Identity gets intertwined with attention — how we see ourselves, and how others see (or don’t see) us.

In addition to its portrayal of grave problems in the American justice system, the book is striking for the layered and conflicting accounts of identity that come into play. Identity gets intertwined with attention — how we see ourselves, and how others see (or don’t see) us.

Echols first came to the attention of local authorities because of his outsider identity. He was a ‘freak’ because he wore black and t-shirts advertising metal bands. He explored a range of religious practices — Catholicism (which led him to change his name [2]), Wicca, mystical esoterica — in a community where evangelical fundamentalism held sway. His difference made him a magnet for rumors.

Read More… Virtual identity: Subversive attention