The Highs and Lows of Wikipedia

I know we're not adding to this blog anymore and it's not entirely related to research methods but I thought I'd share this link on the off chance someone looks here...

http://tech.ca.msn.com/anyone-can-edit-wikipediaor-not-1

For anyone who took INF1001 last year this article is pretty hilarious.  Basically a U of T prof in the psychology department urged his students to edit Wikipedia.  The project backfired big time.  Wikipedia editors were unimpressed by the number of edits being made by the students and claimed that the students weren't referencing their sources properly.  It lead to some pretty heated discussions that really called into question Wikipedia's stance as the encyclopedia "anyone can edit".

Parts

I had my dog neutered this week. I know that may sound peculiar to mention but as I desperately tried to get my research paper finished, I started to think about things that have nothing to do with research papers but that impact them greatly. I know, I know … very tangential thoughts but so too are dog park gate systems :-). I think as I felt sorry for my whining dog who gave up his parts, I considered the parts of our creativity that we give up as researchers as well. We may start off with what we consider to be creative and innovative ideas and then as the research takes off, we realize that some of those ideas really just won’t work. As we whittle off parts of a research plan, things become more evident … ideas that we thought were brilliant suddenly appear to be disconnected. I think the connections between parts of research are pretty important but funnily enough, I feel like this comprehension didn’t happen for me until the very end of the course. This is not a complaint but instead something akin to an epiphany. I feel like the connections that were made in preparing a proposal are something I can definitely take with me into other courses or other research opportunities. Like Amanda’s observations below on magic versus the transparency of methodology, I think it is important to admit or perhaps expose how unorthodox methods or just plain crazy ideas sometimes mark the beginnings of good research.

Diary: working methods

I would like to comment on a few points that Thomas makes in "Diary: working methods".

Thomas states:  “It never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. For just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.”

·         I don’t think it’s so much about the magic as it is about what future readers can learn about the research methods and/or the authors’ work.  This is especially important for two reasons when one examines a paper like Hartel’s “Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking”:

1.      Hartel claims that her project provides an original conceptual framework and research method for the study of information in personal spaces such as the home, and describes information phenomena in a popular, serious leisure, hobby setting.  Having no existing framework to rely on makes transparency important.

2.       If it is true that we can only see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, then Hartel sharing her methods for coding to describe information phenomena in the home (table 1, page 855), will only aid future researchers, especially when Hartel is working with an original conceptual framework.

Thomas states:  “In his book on The Footnote, Anthony Grafton quotes a letter by the great Swiss historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt, reporting that he had just cut up his notes on Vasari’s Lives into 700 little slips and rearranged them to be glued into a book, organized by topic.  From this practice of making notes on separate slips of paper there emerged what became the historian’s indispensable tool until the electronic age: the card index.”  

This quote reminded me of Luker’s use of index cards for interview questions.  She first starts by writing down every single question she wants answers to on separate cards and then rephrasing it into jargon free and accessible language to use during the interview.  After this step begins the clumping: sorting the index cards by topic outline and areas of interest and arranging the questions as “closely as possible to an approximation of natural language” (Luker, 2008);

 

·       Marginalia:  what’s not to love!  Every time I think of marginalia, I think of paper shortages, and this always fondly and sadly reminds me of poor Bakhtin who used his research notes and his manuscript as rolling paper.  I cannot imagine our loss.

Works Cited

Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66(6), 847-874. [http://go.utlib.ca/cat/7723987]

Luker, K. (2010). Salsa dancing into the social sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (ISBN 9780674048218)

Thomas, K. 2010. Diary: working methods. London Review of Books, 32(11), 36-7. [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n11/keith-thomas/diary]

Community Informatics and the Case Study

I'm going back again, but this time to case studies. As I work on my research proposal and look ahead to another assignment for another class, I realise that they are both well suited to case study comparisons. In my SSHRC proposal I didn't mention case studies because they weren't really on my radar even though I referenced a number of other case studies within the field of development as well as community informatics. I had also read a lot of case studies in my research for my SSHRC proposal, this final research proposal and my other assignment (which is a report on the evaluation and sustainability of CI driven projects in three Pacific Island Countries). Looking back through my readings, probably 90% were case studies. In one of the main texts I am using: Community Informatics: Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies edited by Michael Gurstein has a whole section about CI case studies. There are no shortages of case studies in the CI field. Is this a bad thing? At first I thought perhaps, but then I checked myself and thought absolutely not (in my humble opinion). Yin (1981) states that the "distinguishing characteristic of the case study is that it attempts to examine: (a) a contemporary phenomenon in its real-life context , especially when (b) the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident" (p. 59). In a field emphasises the importance of context, it is no wonder that CI researchers tend to create case studies.

Yin, R.K. (1981). The case study crisis: Some answers. Administrative Science Quarterly 26(1), 58-65.

Last week's class on ethics was fascinating both as a researcher but also as someone interested in the "field of information."  Because in a sense, ethics is all about information.  Do the participants have the information on possible health risks? privacy issues? possible risks to stress, embarrassment and all such other possibilities?  I think Dean said something to the effect that the benefits needed to outweigh the risks.  Who makes this judgement?  We heard about the composition of the review board.  While I think it would be fascinating to review all sorts of proposals, the responsibility to see beyond the words, to imagine the implications for all but especially for those who are not able to imagine (intelligence, ignorance..) is a great one.  One should not go through the motions when thinking about an ethics approval.  While it is always easier to imagine the benefits to oneself, it is harder to see some of the unintended or hidden drawbacks for the participants.
Mary

Identifiers

Like others before me (Karen, Jacqueline, and Victoria) I have been thinking a lot about participant anonymity. In his guest lecture, Dean Sharpe talked about delinking identifiers. Identifiers can be anything from audio or video recordings to name or e-mail addresses, etc. that can identify the participant. Even search histories.

Earlier this semester in my information policy class we were discussing the 2006 AOL search history debacle. An AOL researcher released over 36 million search queries and IP addresses of hundreds of thousands of AOL users collected over a three month period. The information was released intentionally but was intended for the research community for research purposes. People were able to identify the individuals based on their search queries. AOL had "de-identified" each user by assigning them a number, however, all of the search queries associated with an IP address were assigned the same number.

• Here is a New York Times article about one of these individuals: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?_r=2. 
• And here is the Wikipedia entry about the scandal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_scandal. 
• And here is an Ars Technica article about it: http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/08/7433/.

Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug created a series of short films about user #711391 title "I Love Alaska." Here is the trailer:

I Love Alaska - Episode 1/13 from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.

You can view them all online here: http://www.minimovies.org/documentaires/view/ilovealaska. This is another Ars Technica article, but this time about "I Love Alaska": http://arstechnica.com/business/2009/01/aol-search-data-spawns-i-love-alaska-short-films/.

How de-identified is de-identified enough? It also makes a very strong case for encrypting data.

I was really intrigued by yesterday's discussion of doxxing on the web.  I felt really conflicted over what happened to the people's whose lives were ruined by having their online persona "outed".  People's online anonymity is important to them.  As someone who frequents Reddit I see a lot of people who will create temporary, throw-away accounts before posting something sensitive.  These throw-away accounts are usually created when a fellow Redditor poses a question to the Reddit community.  People want to answer but they don't want anyone to be able to trace the answer back to them.  There's a need to share experiences with people online but preserving anonymity is crucial.  I think the same could be applied to interviews.  People might want to share their experiences or opinions but are scared that their identities might be revealed.  I think that if a researcher approached the same Redditors and asked them to do an interview there would be hesitation.  An in-person interview feels less anonymous than replying to questions in an online forum even though the researcher probably has a much stricter confidentiality  agreement.