Research Ethical Practices in the Handling of Social Media Data
As part of my fellowship, I am using qualitative, guided expert interviews to investigate everyday research ethics practices in social media research. At different stages of a research project with social media data, research ethics decision points arise: What data may be collected, what methods should be used, and what results should be published? Have the users of a specific platform consented to the research, what are their privacy expectations? Who benefits from the research results?
The aim of the fellowship is to focus on research ethics challenges at the interface between data infrastructures, commercial platform operators and methodological requirements as they arise in research with Big Data from social media and other sources. In such research, certain internet-mediated phenomena such as particular economies of data and attention contribute to changing research contexts in different disciplines. New data practices are emerging that challenge us to rethink more fundamentally agreements and conditions of knowledge production.
Research focus
- Data Ethics
- Science and Technology Studies
- Big Data
- Web Science
- Data Management and Archiving
Curriculum Vitae
- Since 2016: Senior Researcher & Team Leader ‘Data Linking & Data Security’, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne
- 2012 – 2016: Postdoc Researche, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne
- 2008 – 2012: Research Associate & Visiting Lecturer, Lancaster University Management School, UK
- 2004 – 2009: PhD in Management Science, Lancaster University, UK
- 1997 – 2004: Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology with a minor in Computer Science and History, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and Johann Wolfgang Goethe – University Frankfurt am Main
Lectures and publications
- Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (forthcoming) Big Social Media Data as an Epistemological Challenge for Sociology. Social World. Special volume “Digital Sociology – Sociology of the Digital?”
- Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2019) Privacy protection through Open Data and Trusted Third Parties: plea for public control of social data In: Friedewald, M., Ochs, C. Hess, T., Lamla, J. (eds.): The Future of the Data Economy: Between Business Model, Collective Good and Consumer Protection, Springer, Series: Media Cultures in the Digital Age, 103-116.
- Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2018) New ethics for the web and for the web scientist? In: Report from Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 18262. 10 Years of Web Science: Closing The Loop. Edited by Susan Halford, James A. Hendler, Eirini Ntoutsi, and Steffen Staab. Dagstuhl Reports, Vol. 8, Issue 06, 185.
- Kinder-Kurlanda, K., Weller, K., Zenk-Möltgen, W., Pfeffer, J., Morstatter, F. (2017) Archiving Information from Geotagged Tweets to Promote Reproducibility and Comparability in Social Media Research. Big Data & Society 4 (2), 1-14.
- Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2017) Big Data. In: Koch, G. (ed.): Digitisation: Theories and Concepts for Empirical Cultural Research. New York: Routledge, 158-176.
- Zimmer, M., Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2017) (eds.) Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Cases and Challenges. New York et al.: Peter Lang.