Throughout the workshop we have been thinking together through some of the potential ethical concerns that might crop up as we proceed with our own projects. Just as we have disucssed thus far, we hope that you see that data and ethics is an ongoing process throughout the lifespans of your project(s) and don’t often come with easy answers.
In this final activity, we would like for you to think about some of the potential concerns that might come up in the scenario below and discuss how you might approach them:
You are interested in looking at the reactions to the democratic party presidential debates across time. You decided that you would use data from twitter to analyze the responses. After collecting your data, you learned that your data has information from users who were later banned and included some tweets that were removed/deleted from the site.
- Would your approach differ if the responses were anonymized v. not?
- Would the number of tweets generated impact your decisions?
- How might where you are at in your project (e.g. "raw" data v. "cleaned" data v. analysed) affect your choices?
Data and ethics are contextually driven. As such, there isn’t always a risk-free approach. We often have to work through ethical dilemmas while thinking through information that we may not have (what are the risks of doing/not doing this work?). We may be approaching a moment where the question is no longer what we could do but what we should do.