IRB Proposal

This is the IRB proposal I did to do my study in Second Life. It contains some information on where I am going with my study. Soon I ll post my thesis proposal these should catch you up on my work!



Purpose and Potential Value of the Study.
My purpose is to study the cultural landscapes found in Second Life. The most recent and successful culture study of Second Life is Tom Boellstorff’s 2008‘s Coming of Age in Second Life. While he looked at many of the traditional aspects of culture and anthropology what I found most intriguing was his argument that virtual worlds signal a Techne Age as opposed to an Information Age. However, my experience with virtual worlds shows the universality of this statement limiting and in need of further investigation. Further more my investigation will explore SL because the major works on virtual worlds are written about SL. I will explore some of the world’s many different communities to see how they express themselves especially in terms of techne or information cultures.
Dr. Boellstorff’s examination of general cultural aspects such race, gender, economics, or politcs prevented him from seeing the trees for the forest. One way of studying how different cultures express their identity is through what geography calls cultural landscape or just landscape. Paraphrasing John Wylie. In the near-century since Carl Sauer began modern-landscape studies, the field has grown to be a central theme of geography. There are many approaches to studying landscapes, even artificial ones like Second Life. All of these require historical and/or anthropological knowledge of the culture that created landscapes. My methodology is informed by J.B. Jackson’s descriptive historical approach and Denis Cosgrove’s critical materialist approach. Throughout his long history as an America’s leading landscape writer, Jackson gave the reader a view of the real world using a highly historical, regional and visual approach to the vernacular landscape most people live in. Cosgrove was the opposite an academic interested in power relationships and class conflict who sought to use painted scenes to show the historical relationship of the classes.
Despite their opposite perspectives, when Jackson’s and Cosgrove’s approaches are synthesized we can see a general approach to what I call “comparative landscape.” In this approach, one uses a highly visual and historical process to compare the different ways communities express their cultures through landscapes. However, to do this, one needs access to a large amount of historic and cultural information which, as shown above, is missing when it comes to SL. It is the search for this information which has leads me to request IRB permission to conduct an ethnographic study in SL.
The main questions to be addressed in this study are:
1. What is the history of the built environments of the simulations I am studying?
2. Why did the builders choose where and what they built?
3. What were their dreams or “nightmares” when it comes to building?
4. Where did they succeed or fail?
5. What do they think the culture/community of this simulation is?
6. Does the landscape feel inviting?
7.Does the landscape help you the visitor to understand the area of the simulation(s)?
8.What does the simulations say to the people?
Once completed, this research will be applied in support of my thesis work and any future work. In addition, many potential informants have expressed interest in this report. Some have even requested that I do a presentation in SL. It seems they see this as a formal validation of their efforts in Second Life. The process of validation produced through my research also helps builders to assess the success of their efforts. Besides providing me with needed Information that will inform my future research, and validating Second Life residents’ efforts, the thesis will facilitate the research of others interested in Second Life. Finally, the tools I develop in this process will help me with my planned dissertation or professional research into other artificial landscapes; like the Palm or World Islands in Dubai by teaching me how to conduct ethnographic and landscape studies of artificial landscapes.

4.Context of the Study.
This review of the key works will revel three problematic issues in virtual-world studies: the travel-story approach as opposed to an academic approach, a lack of ethnographic materials, and the reliance on a monocultural perspective.
Cultural study of virtual worlds is sparse, with just a few gems appearing over the last twenty years. Three-dimensional virtual worlds like Second Life have a complex history, which is best traced through the late 1980s and 1990s text-based, multi-user domains (MUDs). While there were attempts to create graphical worlds as far back as the 1980, it was not until the start of the new millennium that computer graphics and broadband Internet connections allowed for the creation of complex virtual worlds.
The first attempts to study the culture and life in MUDs started in the mid-1990s with two bestsellers. Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community, published in 1994, was followed in 1995 by Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. While both of these works looked at MUDs and the communities within them, Negroponte was more concerned with the effects of technology than with the communities. Rheingold focused more on the communities, but his book lacked the intellectual rigor accepted in most academic settings. It reads more like a modern-day travel story and booster book than a cultural study or history.
It would be almost five years before the next serious cultural studies of the Internet, and specifically MUDs, would appear. In 1999 Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock, was published by Rotledge. An anthology of articles, this work covered many problematic aspects of modern culture within the Internet such as: race, gender, politics, economics and power. However, “Virtual communities as communities: net surfers don’t ride alone” an article in the anthology, by Barry Wellman and Milena Guila, is the best attempt to look at the actual cultures within MUDs.
Wellman, a professor of sociology, and Guila, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto at the time of the article, looked at two questions Can people find community online in the Internet? Can relationships between people who never see, smell, touch or hear each other be supportive and intimate?
The authors admit to a lack of creditable ethnography work to answer these questions, which led them to use a study of “computer-supported cooperative work” that was used throughout the 1990s. In addition they used anecdotes, traveler stories and their own experiences to fill in the gaps. The two concluded that communities do exist and resemble the flexibility of modern communities. These communities were also strongly supportive and intimate. Despite their efforts, the article’s lack of reliable background research and the study of text worlds instead of the graphic virtual worlds render much of it dated.
The next important work, published in 2008, is Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life. The book cites Wellman and Milena Guila’s work. Boellstorff, an anthropologist at the University of California-Irving and editor in chief of American Anthropology, is considered the foremost anthropologist studying virtual worlds, SL in particular.
The book goes a step farther than Wellman and Guila when describing the community or culture of SL. Boellstroff argues culture has entered an age of techne, meaning applying of science and arts for creating, not an information age were information is just, studied, stored, and transferred. SL is a prime example of this new age because it is a creation of not just a new world but of new identities.
This new paradigm hides a flaw in Boellstorff’s reasoning. He assumes SL, and by extension all virtual worlds, share the same culture. His monocultural approach fails to address the differences between virtual worlds like Second Life and World Of Warcraft. More importantly he fails to detail the cultural differences one can find within SL’s different areas. This could be explained by the small number of virtual worlds that existed as well as the small size of SL itself at the time of the book’s publication.
Many researchers have since followed Boellstorff’s monocultural approach, other books, however, such as I, Avatar, by Mark Stephen Meadows and The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au take the travel story approach to Second Life.

5. Location of the Study.
Because this is a study of landscapes, I plan to walk around the landscapes with the
Informants, with all conversations being held in private chat as much as possible.
Specifically I want to study three communities in my field studies: Information Archipelago, West of Ireland and Caledon. The first is dedicated to academic topics, and the librarians and educators there represent an information culture. The last one, Caledon, is in a Steampunk Victorian era and is extremely techne in nature. West of Ireland is a charity simulation dedicated to helping the children of Ireland, and represents a crossover of techne and information cultures.
Information Archipelago and Caledon are relatively the same size. They have about 45 interconnected pieces of land with about 800 full and part time resident each. It can only be estimated how many have direct landscape creating ability. A reasonable number would be about 5%. West of Ireland is much smaller with just 6 pieces of land and a few hundred full and part time residents.

6. Dates of the Study.
09/01/09/-07/31/10

7.Subjects (Participants).
This research project is focused on builders or creators of the simulations. Because SL is largely anonymous, traditional demographic information is limited and unreliable. Linden labs have placed strict age limits in place to ensure minors can not access the adult grid. Therefore all participates should be adults.
Each participate in my study will be volunteers and if they feel threaten by the power relationship they will be able to walk away or log off at will. This is unlike traditional environments where informants have little option but to accept the anthropologist intrusion into their life.
The Secondary class of participants consist of people interacting in the landscape created by the builders. The majority of these precipitants will only be observed, though, a few may be selected to be actively involved in the study. This will provide an extra level of understanding.
This being said what I am interested in is residents who have permission to build on the simulation, and have spent at least one year in SL. I can identify these people through a list of builders and through checking their “rez” date (the date they first become active in SL), which is listed on their profiles.

8.Participant Payment and/or Costs.
I am not giving any payments to participants and expect no subject to incur added financial expenses for participating.
9. Methods and Procedures for Recruitment and Participation.
Recruitment will occur in three ways. The first will be through “Group Notices,” which are sent to people who volunteered to be in a group. Second, through posters placed in SL where permission is granted. The last method of recruitment will be via instant messages to individuals or groups. I will encourage non-English speakers’ participation by agreeing to use instant message translators whenever asked.
Most contact will be done in SL through instant messages. However the participants will be requested to send “note cards,” which are asynchronous messages similar to e-mail messages, if they wish to share information with me when I am unavailable.
Once they agree to participate, I will ask subjects to walk around the simulations, engaging in one-on-one conversations about their activities in the field locations. I will also ask them to join a focus group that meets once a month. Toward the end of the process, I will ask subjects to participate in a brief online survey to help judge the benefits and success of the research
It is estimated that each conversation will last one hour each, with about five interviews per person. The focus groups will be two hours each. The survey will take about 15 minutes. This would mean a fully committed participant would have to commit to no more than 25 hours, 15 minutes to the research.

10. Participant Confidentiality.
While SL residents have usernames, these are not necessarily anonymous. Many planned participants’ user names can be linked to real names. Even those who cannot be linked could be identified by friends through their expression of goals, beliefs and agendas.
Therefore, secondary pseudonyms need to be developed and the reference will be kept strictly confidential and finally destroyed at the end of the research. To further ensure protection, no one other then the PI will have access to the original data. These records will be maintained by the PI on either the home computer in protected documents or as Second Life IM logs and note cards, which are protected by Second Life's software and the PI logon password.

11. Data Collection, Analysis, and Reporting.
The main methodology to be deployed during the research period will be a combination of ethnography and ethnomethodology, applying one or the other as needed. This will be supplemented with focus groups and a closing survey.
The ethnography/ethnomethodology will be conducted through what feminist ethnographers see as a conversation, or more generally known as the collaborative relationship. This approach allows for the mutual development of the research agenda. In theory, this helps to create a more just research. The analysis will be conducted through coded field notes used to organize and stress key passages. One must remember what Lisa Malkki, an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University, says about ethnography in Improvising Theory Process and Temporality in Ethnography with Allaine Cerwonka. Ethnography is like jazz and is improvised as the research progresses, but the researcher must have a firm knowledge of methodology.
Focus groups will be developed for each community lasting three months using the previously gathered individual research. The purpose would be to develop a group understanding of key concepts produced through the ethnography work. The survey will be conducted at the end of research, and it will be used to help confirm data from the field notes. The purpose of the survey is to gain an understanding of the community of builders relationship with the landscapes they create and the secondary participates who live in the landscapes. It will look at length of time as builders, number of projects the builder have been involved, reactions received and difficulties they may have faced. The exact questions will be developed through the research. The results will be made available to the participants.
Beyond the interviews, I will also need to develop a large collection of photos of the simulations to compare and contrast the landscapes. This work will be collected and used as data for my thesis/final presentation. I also plan to use the information in several professional presentations and journal articles. Finally I plan to attend a PhD program and may use the data in future studies of artificial landscapes.

12. Informed Consent.
In order to gather the most positive responses, I prefer to give the consent forms to participants at the interview. However, I am willing to use the note-card method so people have time to become familiar with the form. Participants can answer the form’s questions through instant messenger/chat, and also can contact the PI whenever the informer has concerns. Because the project is not designed to study the differences among people, there is no reason to create a different consent form for people with disabilities. Also SL has strict age restrictions and I do not intend to research children, there will be no need for separate consent forms for children.
While I intend only to take landscape pictures, I recognize there could be a need to take photos that include participants, and therefore will have to include a short consent form for photographs in the primary consent form. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Privacy Rule do not apply to this research.

13.Expected benefits.
Individually, participants have a chance to review their work in a wider context of culture and community. This analysis may allow them to understand the success and failure of their designs in light of how their creations are perceived by others. This knowledge would also be helpful as participants create their own landscapes or in future SL studies. This will be especially true for those rejecting the monoculture approach by exploring the distinct culture of other worlds, regions, and communities, which have been created.
14.Potential risks.
Traditional studies face many different types of risks, medical studies more so then ethnographical studies. These ethnographical studies still have to worry about harming the individuals emotional and community standings. Studies of ethnographic ethics show this is done most often through: abuse of the power relationship, disclosure of the informants identity with out permission, failure to keep confidential records in a secure environment, and by putting undue pressure on the participates to answer questions they are uncomfortable answering.
Because of stakeholder issues when it comes to planning, designing, implementing and creating landscapes, there is a minimal chance of social, cultural and emotional risk to individuals. Another benefit of the project is we are only looking at landscapes not divisive issues such as race, gender or sexual attitudes to name just a few. I will seek to prevent this during the interviews by avoiding antagonistic questioning. While I expect participants in focus groups to be polite and well mannered some people still feel less free to talk in a group setting. One way around this, unique to a virtual world, is the ability to use alternative and unknown identities. While not mandatory for the focus group this may encourage others to participate. Furthermore, I will be using coded names and aggregation to obscure remarks that may identify participants. If the participant feels threatened by the line of questioning, he or she can stop the questioning. In the end, all field notes will be stored, coded, on a hard drive and DVD.

15. Risk-to-Benefit Ratio.
While I recognize the possibility of risk, I do believe it is minimal compared to the reward of additional knowledge. This knowledge benefits the participants, future researchers and myself. The risks are minimized by the topic, aggregation and coding.