Ok, gonna keep it particularly short again this week, since I’m focused on more submittable writing.

I attended the CRDM Short Circuits event on Thursday to hear from two Brazilian scholars; both of their presentations resonated with my dissertation.

Prof. Joana Ziller offered thoughts on research that deals with vulnerable populations and our ethical and political responsibilities as scholars when studying such groups, including:

Acknowledgment of how close we are to the population studied (including membership) while balancing this innate understanding against the human tendency to universalize personal experience.

Crafting research that both records and challenges the violence done to these communities, and is accessible to those communities.

Embracing anti-normative research methods as an essential part of documenting and protecting vulnerable populations.

And ensuring that our research/attention does not propagate further harm to those studied.

Prof. Carlos D’Andrea spoke about the pitfalls of datafication, the use of APIs in research (even as the access landscape around these data sources changes dramatically), and the ethics of data scraping.

Obviously, both of these presentations were directly relevant to my research that examines a device that, I argue, is not just used by or part of a marginalized community, but plays an active role in the production of multiple multiply marginalized communities, and APIs are integral to both the function of the PiShock and my data collection methods.

To be clear, the PiShock is used by queer people, straight people, furries, not-furries (though furries are central to the brand aesthetic of the PiShock), sadomasochists, sex workers, and others. The PiShock relies on an API to function at all, and both PnP and my data collection draw

explicitly on APIs for operation and content. My takeaway from these presentations, however, was most reassuring. While there certainly are consent issues involved in any population study (perhaps arguably the use of any author’s work at all) and the aggregation of publicly posted content without the author’s express permission, the reality of dissertation development in the digital age is that for research to get produced, we need to use these resources and, further, it would be neglectful to abandon these data sources due to our ethical unease about corporate EULAs. Point being, by using critical making and critical coding as mediating technologies that translate internet discourse into physical sensation, I am significantly less concerned about the potential negative impacts of my research on these populations. I believe this research project is structured in such a way as to avoid these dangers because the data being pulled is exclusively publicly available, anonymized, aggregated, and unstored.