Publications

Much excitement, public and scholastic, surrounds the ascent of Facebook, a social-networking website attracting over 500 million users since its inception in 2004. Facebook has been increasingly integrated into the public sphere, proliferating media activities, communication practices, and social experiences. It has become a glowing reference to the mounting centrality of internet technologies in our…

Transcription of interview material can be a daunting task for the qualitative researcher, not only in terms of the extensive time requirement, but also due to concerns around producing transcripts that ‘accurately’ reflect interviews. This reflection paper addresses some of the tensions I experienced as a geography student encountering transcription for the first time. It…

The argument for access to sensitive unit-level data produced within government is usually framed in terms of risk, and the legal responsibility to maintain confidentiality, even where the government has a duty to provide data. This paper argues that the way the question is framed may be restricting the set of possibilities; and that the…

The ethical governance of social research is now well entrenched within the academy in the UK and elsewhere. Whereas, in the not so distant past, ethical research practice was a matter for the researcher to articulate and manage, research ethics are now a matter for institutions to govern. Departmental or University ethics committees or boards…

Disclosure detection and control for analytical outputs is an almost unexplored field. However, with the increase in access to detailed microdata, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to quantify exactly what the risks are from allowing, for example, regression coefficients to be released. This paper looks in detail at the risks of linear…

Statistical disclosure control (SDC) in a research environment poses particular problems. Most SDC research is concerned with ensuring that a finite set of tabular outputs are safe from disclosure, or that microdatasets are sufficiently anonymised. By its nature, a research environment is one where confidential data is made available for analysis with very few restrictions….

There is an increasing interest in the use of IT-based tools to encourage public participation in environmental decision making. Typically, this has involved the development of (predominantly prototype) systems applied in workshop scenarios with those stakeholders with an immediate interest in the planning issue in hand. Increasingly, however, the Internet is being used to explore…

Previous research has drawn attention to the importance of measuring accessibility to public transit services for transport planning and decision-making purposes and to the use of GIS to produce accessibility maps. Existing measures have been criticised for their lack of sophistication and reliance on simple operations such as Euclidean buffering. This article introduces an accessibility…

Access to restricted microdata for research is increasingly part of the data dissemination strategy within countries, made possible by improvements in technology and changes in the risk-benefit perceptions of NSIs. For international data sharing, relatively little progress has been made. Recent developments in Germany, the Netherlands and the US are notable as exceptions. This paper…

Chapter in Quantum Engagements: Social Reflections of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies, edited by Ferrari, A., Fiedeler, U., Coenen, C., Zülsdorf, T., Milburn, C. and Wienroth, M. Today, nanoscience and emerging technologies weave ever more tightly into the social fabric. Scientific and technological innovations at the infinitesimal depths of matter now entail cultural, political, and philosophical…