Abstract
The Open Data Initiative in the UK offers incredible opportunities for researchers who seek to gain insight from the wealth of public and institutional data that is increasingly available from government sources – like NHS prescription and GP referral information – or the information we freely offer online. Coupled with digital technologies that can help teams generate connections and collaborations, these data sets can support large-scale innovation and insight. However, by looking at a comparable explosion in data-driven journalism, this article hopes to highlight some of the ethical questions that may arise from big data. The popularity of the social networking service Twitter to share information during the riots in London in August 2011 produced a real-time record of sense-making of enormous interest to academics, reporters and to Twitter users themselves; however, when analysed and published, academic and journalistic interpretations of aggregate content was transformed and individualized, with potential implications for a user-base that was unaware it was being observed. Similar issues arise in academic research with human subjects. Here, the questions of reflexivity in data design and research ethics are considered through a popular media frame.
Highlights
It was lauded by open science advocates and researchers
The data release must be accompanied by an assurance that the public is aware the data made open will be treated responsibly and ethically, and that no harm will come to the sources of the information. This issue is tackled by ethical protocols at research institutions, which continue to adapt guidelines to contend with the increasing amount of ‘big’ data sets that are being collected and are becoming available in digital formats
A few weeks after the government announced the NHS data schedule, I attended a meeting of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Conducting Research on the Internet Working Party. This was a timely discussion; two days earlier a UK broadsheet had published an analysis of the sources and trajectories of rumours that diffused across the social networking service Twitter during the August 2011 riots in London
Summary
In web-based scenarios, the relationship between the researcher and the software developer is multiple. The significance of other community-evolved features, like Twitter’s hashtag (#) followed by a userdetermined subject word to collate subject-related content, may not be apparent in the data in its raw form These socially-derived boundaries may, in part, be determined by the ways the creators of the systems construct the software parameters; as Melvin Kranzberg opined, ‘technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’.2. Twitter’s function is to provide a platform on which to share short messages with people who subscribe to a user’s feed; a reciprocal relationship is not required Contrast this with the relationship mechanic in another popular social network, Facebook: the connection implementation in that service has established a ‘relationship’ as existing between two consenting account holders. Rumour will spread through a system like Facebook, it is likely that (mis)information would spread in a different pattern across Twitter than in Facebook as it is a service with less account verifiability and more heterogenous connections
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