Research ethics: Check list for regulatory ethics

Along with Johnny Unger, David Barton and Michele Zappavigna, I'm writing a new student text book for Routledge: Researching the Language of Social Media.

I'm in the process of writing the chapter on ethics.  This feels like quite a responsibility to get right!  Each section of the chapter will end with a series of questions which students can use to reflect on their decisions made at different parts of the research process.

Here are the questions which I have drafted for the section on 'regulatory ethics'.  Are there any other questions about regulations that I should include?

• ·         Are you carrying out your work in a context which requires your project to be approved by an institutional committee or review board?
• ·         Will you be collecting data which is subject to data protection or copyright legislation?
• ·         Have you consulted the best practice guidelines for your discipline?
• ·         What ethical decisions did other researchers make about similar projects, and was this satisfactory?
• ·         Is the material you want to study governed by site-specific regulations? Do these regulations restrict how you represent yourself, interact with others, collect or reuse data from the site?
• ·         Who are the people in your academic community with whom you could discuss ethical decision-making?

Teaching Creative Writing Using Wikipedia

This morning I am teaching a class for our first year module: An Introduction to Writing Creatively.

We've been discussing how to write and publish material online, using Wikipedia as a case study. 

The students have chosen a controversial topic, written their own version, have compared this with Wikipedia's version of the same topic and are now editing each other's work.

The topics they have chosen include: Sir Jimmy Savile, Same Sex Marriage in the UK, the Soham Murders, the Watergate Scandal, and Mormonism.

We're using this experience to generate a list of top issues that emerge when (1) Writing about controversy and (2) Editing each other's work.  Here is a summary of the topics they raised:

Issues related to Writing about Controversy:

• How much can you rely on your reader's knowledge?
• It's hard to stay neutral because the cases are very big and well publicised. This influences your opinion.
• The reliability of 'experts' can be questionable.
• It  is difficult not to give undue weight to particular aspects of a case (in terms of focus and sidelining other material)
• You need an explanation of key terms: jargon can exclude fair representation of a topic.
• Repetition can be difficult to avoid - and repetition can be dangerous because you can obscure details and repetition can be used as a rhetorical effect which sways audience response.
• The publication or use of controverisal material might have long term implications (e.g. what if Maxine Carr's child found they were studying the Wikipedia article for the Soham murder in class?)
• If you are quoting newspapers, how you contextualise these can vary in terms of how biased the citation might appear.
• It's difficult to provide enough information for your audience without overwhelming them with detail.

Tips for editing a non-fictional account of a controversial event:

• Don't overload the lead section with detail: include the key facts first.
• Be careful about how you structure giving information: think about how sections can be used to organise definitions and topics, and give focus to the subject matter.
• Make sure that the information is logical and chronological: that it does not jump around too much.
• Make sure that the opening sentence makes the topic clear from the outset.
• Use signposting judiciously to guide the reader

With thanks and acknowledgement to Rob, Jordan, Alyson, Lauren, Sarah and Charlotte.

Article on Counter narratives and Wikipedia

So I have been hopelessly, shamefully bad at posting to my blog.  I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, just really busy with lots of different things.  Here's an abstract for an essay I've just finished writing and is under review for a special issue of 'Language and Literature'. If you'd like to read the full draft, please email me.

Counter narratives and controversial crimes: The Wikipedia article for the ‘Murder of Meredith Kercher’

Narrative theorists have long recognised that narrative is a selective mode of representation. There is always more than one way to tell a story, which may alter according to its teller, audience and the social or historical context in which the story is told.  But multiple versions of the ‘same’ events are not always valued in the same way: some versions may become established as dominant accounts, whilst others may be marginalised or resist hegemony as counter narratives (Bamberg and Andrews, 2004).  This essay explores the potential of Wikipedia as a site for positioning counter and dominant narratives.  Through the analysis of linearity and tellership (Ochs and Capps, 2001) as exemplified through revisions of a particular article (‘The Murder of Meredith Kercher’), I show how structural choices (open versus closed sequences) and tellership (single versus multiple narrators) function as mechanisms to prioritise different dominant narratives over time and across different cultural contexts.  The case study points to the dynamic and relative nature of dominant and counter narratives.  In the ‘Murder of Meredith Kercher’ the counter narratives of the suspects’ guilt or innocence and their position as villains or victims depended on national context, and changed over time.  The changes in the macro-social narratives are charted in the micro-linguistic analysis of structure, citations and quoted speech in four selected versions of the article, taken from the English and Italian Wikipedias. 

I argue that site architecture of Wikipedia is structured in such a way to suppress or foreground narrative controversy in different ways.  The article’s front page is default view for readers where the dominant narrative is likely to be foregrounded and controversy is obscured.  In contrast, the talk pages document a meta-narrative of conflict between contributors as they negotiate which material might be included in the account.  Between the front page and the talk pages is a third, liminal narrative space: the revision pages of the article.  As the prior, but less visible versions of the ongoing narrative-in-progress, the archive allows the recovery of previous retellings, but always subordinates the polyphonic controversy of earlier retellings to the pages hidden behind the hegemonic, superficially unified narrative which is given precedence on the article’s main front page. In this way, Wikipedia is able to manage the tensions of controversial narration, simultaneously acknowledging that no single version of events can tell the ‘whole story’ of these controversial crimes (by allowing access to previous versions of the article), but giving primary position to the version of events most in keeping with Wikipedia’s own values of ‘Neutral Point of View’.

Google Plus and Student Feeback

Following in the footsteps of my colleague Alan Cann, we’ve been piloting the use of Google Plus to support our first year undergraduate module (History of English) at the University of Leicester.

One of the ways we have used the stream is to encourage student feedback on the module on a week-by-week basis.  Traditionally, module feedback is taken once the teaching has finished and used to feed forward into the redesign of the module for the coming year.  We have not found a satisfactory way of allowing students to see what we do with their feedback, and only a small sample of students (10% of the cohort) usually completes the surveys.  But we know that feedback is vital, should be formative, rapid and dialogic.

Last week we posted our first ‘#Fridayreflection’ question, asking students to reflect on the role of Powerpoint presentations in lectures as part of their learning.  Only nine students (of the 160 signed up to the circle) posted to the stream on this topic, but still, the feedback was very useful. It has mean that we could modify the presentations right away (we are only in week 3 of the course) and, more importantly, we could talk with the students immediately about their comments.

I’m hoping that more students will join in, and I want to find a way of encouraging higher levels of engagement.  We are not assessing their contributions, so the feedback is voluntary.  If you’ve got suggestions, please let me know!

It's all about you? Celebrating a year of BBC Woman's Hour on Twitter

Earlier this week I got a call from the producer of BBC Woman's Hour, who had read the press release that the University of Leicester recently ran about my new book (Stories and Social Media).  Later this month (27th December), BBC Woman's Hour are running an item on Twitter and women. Very exciting!

So the linguist in me couldn't resist taking a peek at the tweets @bbcwomanshour have posted over the last year and seeing how their vital statistics matched up with some of the patterns I've observed in celebrity, corporate and 'ordinary' use of Twitter.  And this is what I found:

Followers v. Following:
The profile information for @bbcwomanshour lists 26,354 followers and 2,590.  Like celebrities and 'ordinary' Twitter members, there are more followers than those that @bbcwomanshour follows.  But the scale of the asymmetry is a ratio 10:1 (followers: following), so closer to the asymmetry that you see on average between 'ordinary' Twitter members (6:1), rather than the disparity on celebrity accounts (60:1).

Types of Tweet:

Like other members of Twitter, @bbcwomanshour use more updates (one-to-many broadcasts) than either directly addressed messages which appear in the public timeline or retweets. Based on the type of tweet, it would seem that @bbcwomanshour is not very conversational.

But that belies the way that @bbcwomanshour seems to be using Twitter, which is not only to promote upcoming features, but to ask the audience for their opinions.  If we look more closely at the pronouns that appear in the tweets, the updates use the pronouns 'you' and 'your' (that focus on the audience) far more frequently than 'us', 'our' or 'we' (that focus on the show's producers and presenters).  And this difference is especially obvious in @bbcwomanshour if we compare it with the way corporate accounts, celebrities and 'ordinary' members of Twitter talk, and if we compare it with large offline corpora (like the British National Corpus or the Contemporary Concordance of American English).

High frequency words and Hashtags
It's not surprising that the most frequent lexical items that appear in the word list for the @bbcwomanshour tweets are topped by 'tomorrow' (which is usually followed by information about an upcoming feature) and 'women' (which appears three times as frequently as 'men') and signals the main themes that the features address.  When we look at the hashtags which are used in tweets we can see that this focus on the show and its featured themes is still present: 8% of all the hashtags used by @bbcwomanshour were directly making the term '#bbcwomanshour' more visible.  The choice of hashtags also shows @bbcwomanshour engaging with current events (like #spendingreview, #tubestrikes), but more than anything else (even more than the #ff tag), the hashtags are about food: (#cooktheperfect, #cooking, #recipe, #pasta, #italianfood, #Maryberry and so on).

It's refreshing that @bbcwomanshour are not simply using Twitter to 'broadcast their brand'.  Their tweets show engagement with their audience (especially in the use of retweets which forward on audience comments for wider response).  And perhaps they hint of the importance that food has for 'women's talk'.  Given that I'm married to the wonderful @tobizzy2bake, talking about, making, eating and sharing food has a key place in family life and the friendships that surround our home. All we need now is for a form of virtual #cake that would actually taste good too.

Follow Friday as Self Branding

As you might know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I've been working on a paper which examines hashtags (#hashtags) in Twitter.  The paper is a study of how hashtags are used by corporate, celebrity and 'ordinary' Twitter accounts.  Today I've been writing about the 'Follow Friday' tag, and its implications for self branding. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

#FF is the abbreviation for ‘Follow Friday’, a weekly practice whereby Twitter members promote to their follower list the usernames of other members that are deemed worthy of interest. These recommendations are considered a token of esteem that within the linguistic economy of Twitter enhances the visibility and follower list of the nominated members. But while the Follow Friday practice appears in part altruistic, it also manifests subtle forms of self-branding, insofar as it enables the recommending updater to establish their position as an expert, who differentiates the hierarchies of perceived value in Twitter. The list of recommended usernames is one means by which the updater can display their network of contacts, and affirm their bonds within that network, which often (although not always) reflects their professional identity. For example, Selfridges uses #FF to promote fashion designers and magazines, the actor William Shatner’s ‘colleagues and friends’ include other actors and directors, while the lawyer recommended ‘legal industry peeps’.




#ff these legal industry peeps @karasmamedia @markbower @tessashepperson @jamesdunninggeo @brianinkster #law #uklaw

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:10



Follow Friday! #ff @vogue_london @grazia_live @nicolerichie

Selfridges, Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:43



Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26:40 +0000 Another #FF for more colleagues and friends @rhettreese @willsasso @christophcarley @ac_field @paulcamuso and one more for @davidzappone

William Shatner, Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:26



The #FF tag also appeared with expressions of thanks, which both acknowledges and reaffirms the hashtag as a means of accruing visibility and support.



Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40:02 +0000 A BIG thank you to everyone who #FF, RTed & mentioned us over the weekend. We always appreciate your support!

Hoover, Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:40



thanks for the #FF love @craigcalcaterra @Jason_IIATMS @fackyouk @BrentSGambill! Traveling, will #FF next week...

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:10



As a form of politeness, thanks imply that the recipient of the ‘Follow Friday’ is in the debt of the recommender. But, at the same time, posting such thanks also builds the reputation of the member by reproducing the recommendation and projecting their identity as someone who is esteemed to be worth following. In some cases, the #FF is explicitly self-promoting, where corporations and celebrities use the practice to advertise their products or outlets, such as the Travel Channel who promoted their new show, Deathwishmovers,



#FF @DeathwishMovers (our new show)

Travel Channel Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:15



Or the actress, Dannii Minogue who recommended the accounts for her fashion line (ProjectD), which sold through the department stores Selfridges and Marks and Spencer, and designed by Tabitha Webb.



#FF @projectdonline @selfridges @marksandspencer @tabswebb

Dannii Minogue, Fri, 14 May 2010 10:29.



What do you think your #FF recommendations say about you? Are they an altruistic attempt to build the reputation of others, or a subtle form of self promotion?

Checklist to be used when planning a new use of social media in HE

Next week, I'll be giving a presentation as part of the Guardian's Professional Seminar Series.  I want to help others think through the planning entailed in using social media to enhance the student experience, and so I've created a check list of questions.  Is there anything I've left out?

Resource gathering
• Has anyone else implemented the kinds of change you are planning? What can you learn from their experience?
• Are there any open resources that would be helpful?
• What equipment or software will be needed? Who will maintain/store it?

Training
• How many staff and students will be involved? What are their training needs?
• What help guides might be needed?
• When will you (or someone else) provide training/induction, coaching and practice sessions?

Departmental/Institutional issues
• How does your innovation fit within institutional /departmental policy and practices?
• Which other staff in your department might need to know about your innovation? What mechanisms are there for sharing good practice?
• If your innovation is based at a module level, what are the implications for other modules the students will undertake?
• Will the student work be archived? Available for other students (and others) to see in later years?
• Does your innovation have benefits for other students beyond your course? Are there links to be made with the library/study skills/employability provision?
• Will your use of social media duplicate existing modes of communication (e.g. email, VLE announcements)?
• Will your use of social media be public?

Role of the Tutor
• What will the role of the tutor entail? Providing content? Technical support? Trouble shooting? Moderation?
• Will tutors provide feedback to students? How often? When? How? How long will this take?
• How does the use of social media relate to what is taught in class contact time?
• Is the use of social media assessed? What criteria will be used?
• How will you ensure that students take part?
• How will you help students develop a public profile/voice through your intervention?

General
• What are your measures of success?
• What risks are entailed?
• Does your innovation create any digital divides, and if so, what can you do about it?