digc101

week 3 lecture 11th August

• ethics--to ask or not to ask?
• expectations of privacy?
• do no harm?
 virtual
research
• should you ask to research:
• in Massive Multiplayer Online
(MMO)gaming cultures?
LAN gamers?
• A LAN game is a Local Area Network of
gamers. Some researchers at uow have
gained ethics approval to study them,
but sometimes it is difficult to get
approval or access. The LAN gamers
tend to be very small communities, and
very private.
• Fan fiction communities? Fan fiction is
fiction written about a tv show, book,
film, band, or person, usually posted to
a fan fiction community. Should fan
fiction be regarded as public and
published? So texts to be analysed? Or
as communities, and people to be
asked for permission?
• Examples of fan fiction: harry potter, x-
files, the l word, lord of the rings, and
several thousand other texts.
• Should you ask for permission, or
should you need ethics clearance, to
study a political advocacy group such
as Getup!
a get up ad
• Get Up have a website to try and get
people involved in their campaigns, to
raise money and sign petitions, and to
try to influence public opinion. Their site
is public. Should you need ethics
approval to study it? What if you went to
their public meetings? What if you went
to members only meetings? Or wanted
to study the members only section of
the website/chats/forums?
• Should you need ethics approval to
study bittorents groups? Bittorents are
free, open-source file sharing
applications that are often used for
peer-to-peer sharing of movies and
music that evade or defy copyright
laws. Would it be ethical to access
these public sites, track users, and
report/research on illegal worldwide
downloading?
• What if the owners of the copyright,
such as Olympic images and footage,
were to search these sites for digitally
encoded footage, and sue these sites to
take down the images?
What about researching other
groups such as amateur porn
production groups or

NRL fan groups, survivor of

abuse groups, teenage peer
groups, uni student sns
groups
 internet groups: types of analysis of
internet groups:

• ethnographies
• discourse analysis
• textual analysis
• content analysis
• quantitative methods--counting
numbers of hits to a webpage, time on
a webpage, such as yahoo or google
trends, or hitwise or a.c. neilson online
research
• Other quantitative methods, such as a
study of the influence and impact of
twitter pages depending on numbers of
followers as well as numbers of tweets.

• https://twitter.com/
• Other methods used for online
research: interviews, surveys, copying
of web forums, discussions, videos,
remixes.
• Ethnographies are studies of an
ethnographic group. It can include
methods such as participant observer,
non participant observer, and covert or
overt observation.
 Tearoom
trade research
An offline ethnography that
set the tone for tighter
controls by human ethics
committees was the infamous
TeaRoom research.
• This research into the tearoom trade
involved covert participant-observer
research. Humphries acted as a lookout
for police at a gay beat based on a tea
room. The publication of this research
potentially harmed the participants, who
had not known that they were being
studied.
• This week’s reading by Dhiraj Murphy
(2008) looked at research ethics for
online researchers. She argues:

• do no harm
• respect groups which have a
reasonable expectations of privacy
• Another research team, Kate O’Riordan
and Elizabeth Bassett (2002) argue that
online communications should be
treated as texts, so should not need
human research ethics approval.
• We will be looking at examples of online
groups in the tutorials, as well as
developing our online skills in creating
web pages for our webification project.
Students will need to start blogging
about their plans for their project, or
start a draft, for submission next week.
• Finally, for anyone struggling with
content, definitions, or who have
questions or suggestions, I am
consulting Tuesdays 2-3pm and Fridays
2-3.30pm in 19.2018. My email is
becky@uow.edu.au
• References
• LAN gamers
http://www.darwingamers.com/lan-
parties/

• Dhiraj Murthy 2008 Digital Ethnography:

An Examination of the Use of New
Technologies for Social Research,
Sociology, 42:5, pp.837-855
• Bassett, E and K O’Riordan 2002,
‘Ethics of Internet Research: Contesting
the Human Subject Model,’ Ethics and
Information Technology, 4:3, pp.233-
247.