Participant consent and metadata, analyses

[Claire Bowern]

James, my point was just that metadata, as a type of data, requires
the same sorts of discussions and thoughts as field data. Some of it
will be non-controversial, others will be tricky. I disagree with you
that "metadata release requires permission" is too broad -- it's the
start of the question about what the metadata contains and how it,
along with other data, should be handled. Thinking about it explicitly
is important. For example, there is a fieldworker who regularly blogs
rather personal information about her consultants, and while she is
careful to anonymize data in her thesis, she doesn't do the same for
her 'personal' web site. That seems to me to show that while she's
thought through the question of data/metadata protection in some way,
she hasn't thought it through fully.
Claire