Study in Online Communciation

[Allen]

Hello everyone.
I am an undergraduate at Northern Michigan University’s department of sociology and anthropology. I have been looking at the NESdev index forums and coding through the post for a study on online communities and solidarity. My paper is mostly theoretical, but discursive data is used from this site to contextualize my argument. Only pseudonyms are used, and no data that isn’t already publicly available is used. I just wanted to make a post so that you all were aware of this project and I can answer any questions.

Thank You.

[segaloco]

For the record I do not consent to any of my content being used in conjunction with LLMs, so if you are plugging any of this into any sort of ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc. program, please refrain from feeding any of my content to one. I know it already happens due to scrapers and such but consider this my declaration of not explicitly consenting to that. Use by humans and strictly humans is fine, and of course please check licenses on any materials I've shared that include one.

[Allen]

Thank you for the question!
This data will be going nowhere near any LLMs. Northern Michigan University takes data security very seriously. Standard procedure is to print out several pages of post, contain them in large binders, and keep them under lock and key until the study is over when they are then shredded. The same will be the case for this study. Everything will be collated by hand using paper, highlighters, and sticky notes. It takes a long time, but it is what we have to do to maintain security. (Also, I don't trust any AI to interpret qualitative data)