The Law and You
Last updated on 2024-03-14 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- What legal considerations are relevant to music researchers using web data?
- What are social media platforms’ standards for collecting and processing user data?
- How does the law relate to the ethics of social media data mining?
Objectives
- Consider legal dimensions of internet research, with an emphasis on social music data about music
- Examine social media platforms’ terms of service
- Address principles of informed consent and protected information
Introduction
This is a lesson created via The Carpentries Workbench. It is written in Pandoc-flavored Markdown for static files and R Markdown for dynamic files that can render code into output. Please refer to the Introduction to The Carpentries Workbench for full documentation.
What you need to know is that there are three sections required for a valid Carpentries lesson:
-
questions
are displayed at the beginning of the episode to prime the learner for the content. -
objectives
are the learning objectives for an episode displayed with the questions. -
keypoints
are displayed at the end of the episode to reinforce the objectives.
Exercise: Music Research Using Web Data
Write one possible benefit and one potential drawback of using web data in music research.
Some potential benefits: * Access to a wide range of people’s responses to music * Quickly gain research data * Minimal cost to data collection * Increase statistical power of findings * May discover patterns in big data that could not be seen otherwise
Some potential drawbacks: * Not representative dataset * May not be aware who exactly we are studying * Ethical issues around informed consent * Risk of losing context for data * May be difficult to interpret large data sets
Challenge 2: how do you nest solutions within challenge blocks?
You can add a line with at least three colons and a
solution
tag.
Figures
You can use standard markdown for static figures with the following syntax:
![optional caption that appears below the figure](figure url){alt='alt text for accessibility purposes'}
Callout
Callout sections can highlight information.
They are sometimes used to emphasise particularly important points but are also used in some lessons to present “asides”: content that is not central to the narrative of the lesson, e.g. by providing the answer to a commonly-asked question.
Math
One of our episodes contains \(\LaTeX\) equations when describing how to create dynamic reports with {knitr}, so we now use mathjax to describe this:
$\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}$
becomes: \(\alpha = \dfrac{1}{(1 - \beta)^2}\)
Cool, right?
Key Points
- Data mining is not an ethically neutral process
- Social media platforms collect and process a significant amount of user data, potentially including information with legal protections
- Researchers should carefully consider their research methods with regard to the law and platform policies