Dr. Katharina E. Kinder-Kurlanda
GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Fellow at CAIS November 2019, from January to February 2020
GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Fellow at CAIS November 2019, from January to February 2020
In my fellowship I use qualitative, semi-structured expert interviews to investigate ethical practices in social media research. Ethical decision points arise in different stages of a research project employing social media data: Which data may be collected, which methods should be used and which results should be published? Have the users of a specific platform agreed to research, what are their expectations regarding the protection of their privacy? Who benefits from research results?
The aim of the fellowship is to focus on ethical challenges at the interface between data infrastructures, commercial platform providers and methodological research requirements as they arise in research employing Big Data from social media and other sources. In such research, internet-mediated phenomena like specific economies of data and attention contribute to changed research contexts in various disciplines. New data practices emerge that ask us to rethink conventions within scientific knowledge production more generally.