Ethics of Internet Research

The Authors: Heidi A. McKee is Assistant Professor of English and an affiliate faculty member of Interactive Media Studies at Miami University. Her research interests include writing theory and practice, digital rhetoric, research methodology, and research ethics. She serves on Miami’s Human Subjects IRB, and she co-chairs the Qualitative Research Network, a national organization of writing and rhetoric researchers. Her co-edited books include Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues (2007) and Technological Ecologies and Sustainability (2009).James E. Porter is Professor of English and Interactive Media Studies at Miami University, where he also serves as director of the composition program. His primary research areas are rhetoric theory, digital media and composing, research ethics and methodology, and business and technical communication. His books include Audience and Rhetoric (1992), Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices (1997, with Patricia Sullivan), and Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing (1998).

«This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the multiple complexities of Internet research ethics.... It will serve as an especially practical and thereby invaluable handbook and guide for researchers seeking to do the right thing as their work confronts them with difficult and often novel ethical challenges.» (From the Foreword by Charles Ess, Drury University, U.S.A., and the University of Aarhus, Denmark)«This book attends to the maze of ethical complexities that confront all researchers in this day and age. McKee and Porter offer an approach that can show any Internet researcher in any field how to conceptualize and act on the grayest of ethical areas. And it does so in ways that are sensitive to the contingent and global nature of communication work.» (Stuart Selber, Penn State University, U.S.A.)