Big-but-intimate data

Reddit is the most vital manifestation of the centuries-old advice genre.

• r/relationship_advice and r/AmItheAsshole hold the intimate conundrums of tens of thousands,
• are discussed by hundreds of thousands,
• and seen by an audience of millions.

Digital humanists face methodological and ethical challenges that scholars of print advice columns never faced (Graham et al. 2015; Milligan 2019).

Public quasi-sensitive disclosures

People share in public forums what would be sensitive elsewhere about their health, work, and relationships.

I call these public quasi-sensitive disclosures—hereafter, disclosures.

They are not sensitive in a regulatory or ERB/IRB sense, and there are no research subjects—but reporting them still merits care.

Two kinds of risk

• Consequential harm: third parties act on reported disclosures to a source’s detriment (e.g., a report of taboo or illegal activity prompting government, employer, or family). Possible, but I know of no such case.
• Affective harm: the more probable negative feelings when a source sees their words reported and discussed outside the original context (Nissenbaum 2004; Klassen & Fiesler 2022).

Ask for consent before using?

A Reddit post about a failed paternity test turns into a case of babies switched at birth. It also prompts discussion of advice hoaxes, a topic of your research.

“The data is already public”

Most advice-genre scholarship and Reddit research presume the data is public and freely usable.

Yet, this stance often fails to “remember the human” behind online disclosures (Zimmer 2010; Fiesler et al. 2024) and that users, even when disguised by the researchers, might object to the use of their public posts (Morant et al. 2021).

Care in Selection & Reporting (CSR)

CSR plots a course between two extremes:

• that all such data is public and usable without constraint, and
• that consent must be obtained from every source.

It complements ethically disguising sources (Bruckman 2002), a valuable but error-prone technique (Reagle 2022).

The framework’s questions

• how dated is the message?
• is the identity of the OP a pseudonym, throwaway, or deleted account?
• is the gravity of the disclosure mild, moderate, or major? (Wallace et al. 2023)
• did the OP engage via comments and updates?
• is it “internet-famous,” syndicated off-site?

A spectrum of practice

• Major gravity → avoided, or alluded to without excerpt or citation.
• Moderate gravity, not widely distributed → disguised in both source and prose.
• Old, throwaway, widely distributed and commented → excerpted and cited.
• Significantly excerpted prose → warrants asking the OP for objection.

Structured annotations

I track provenance and treatment with embedded HTML comments in my markdown manuscripts:

<!-- ethics: c:[[case]] d:[[date]] g:[[gravity]] i:[[identity]] p:[[prose]] s:[[syndicated]] u:[[updated]] r:[[responded]] n:[[note]] -->

A mild, eleven-year-old, throwaway-posted, syndicated, updated, uncontacted camping conflict I excerpt verbatim:

<!-- ethics: c:camping d:old g:mild i:throwaway p:verbatim s:yes u:yes r:na n:na -->

These never appear in the finished manuscript, but are easy to track and analyze.

Disguised citations

Disguised sources have both a proper bibliographic entry and a corresponding disguised citation.

The manuscript then yields undated citations such as:

Disguised_OP, “Gaslighting (Disguised Post),” Reddit.

Careful selection and reporting offers digital humanists a way to use public quasi-sensitive disclosures.

A middle path between the extremes of:

1. wantonly reporting disclosures, and
2. being inappropriately encumbered by requirements rightly reserved for actual human-subjects research.

Thanks!