(no subject)
Mar. 15th, 2004 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI'm putting together a research proposal that, among other things, is going to involve an analysis of the emotional content of writing samples. I'm planning to use techniques that are developed by a Texas psychologist named James Pennebaker.
On his website, he's posted reprints of several of his research articles. I was scrolling through them, looking for titles which might be relevant to my study, when something I moused over brought up a URL in the status bar that contained the words "LiveJournal." Surprised, I looked up and saw the article title "Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001," and a note that they studied language use in 1000 LiveJournals for the period around September 11.
I felt an immediate surge of revulsion and violation. My stomach churned. All I could think was, "But I keep a LiveJournal." I was completely taken aback by the strength of the sense of utter violation.
It lasted until I got far enough into actually reading the article to realize that my LJ wasn't included in the sample. (They only included people who gave permission for their LJs to be spidered by web browsers. They didn't, however, individually ask people for permission to analyze their LJs.) Then it slowly subsided, especially as I realized that no one's journal was actually quoted. The negative emotions didn't dissipate entirely until I went on and read another article, a dry technical one.
Here's what I want to know: am I weird? Or does this seem like a violation of privacy, an intrusion, to anyone else?
On his website, he's posted reprints of several of his research articles. I was scrolling through them, looking for titles which might be relevant to my study, when something I moused over brought up a URL in the status bar that contained the words "LiveJournal." Surprised, I looked up and saw the article title "Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001," and a note that they studied language use in 1000 LiveJournals for the period around September 11.
I felt an immediate surge of revulsion and violation. My stomach churned. All I could think was, "But I keep a LiveJournal." I was completely taken aback by the strength of the sense of utter violation.
It lasted until I got far enough into actually reading the article to realize that my LJ wasn't included in the sample. (They only included people who gave permission for their LJs to be spidered by web browsers. They didn't, however, individually ask people for permission to analyze their LJs.) Then it slowly subsided, especially as I realized that no one's journal was actually quoted. The negative emotions didn't dissipate entirely until I went on and read another article, a dry technical one.
Here's what I want to know: am I weird? Or does this seem like a violation of privacy, an intrusion, to anyone else?
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 03:02 pm (UTC)Admittedly, it is harder to get a sense of _your_ content from usenet because the data points are distributed around in a number of news groups and threads in those news groups. But it would be doable.
I'll have to think some more about this (and prevent myself from looking into the technical side of extracting text from archived usenet news).
no subject
Date: 2004-03-15 03:20 pm (UTC)Yeah, "on a postcard", but it feels like I'd tacked up the postcard in a coffeeshop that my friends gather in, and someone from the outside had swooped in and removed them and taken them away for research.
Hmm...Something to discuss with a friend of mine who does historical research on letters.
(And going back to topic, my posts on Usenet tended to be far less personal, as far as datasharing.)