After we posted our initial exchange, and posited our formative thoughts about openness and politics, we could not have anticipated – much less controlled – who would join as reader or conversant, what they would contribute as an annotator, and how we would subsequently react.

After we posted our initial exchange, and posited our formative thoughts about openness and politics, we could not have anticipated – much less controlled – who would join as reader or conversant, what they would contribute as an annotator, and how we would subsequently react.

Because of both the content that people upload and the behavioral traces that they leavebehind, social network sites have unprecedented quantities of data concerning humaninteraction. This presents unique opportunities and challenges. On one hand, SNSs offera vibrant “living lab” and access to behavioral data at a scale inconceivable to manysocial scientists. On the other, the data that are available present serious research ethicsquestions and introduce new types of biases that must be examined (boyd and Crawford2012)

For those of us who believe that social network sites are socio-technical systems, in whichsocial and technical factors shape one another, failing to describe the site under studyignores the fact that the technological constraints and affordances of a site will shapeuser practices and that social norms will emerge over time. Not including informationabout what the feature set was at the time of data collection forecloses the possibility ofidentifying patterns that emerge over time and through the accumulated scholarshipacross a range of sites and user samples. Unfortunately, because they have no knowledgeabout how things will continue to evolve and which features will becomeimportant to track, researchers may not be able to identify the salient features to reportand may struggle with devoting scarce publication space to these details, but this doesn’tundermine the importance of conscientious consideration towards describing the artifactbeing analyzed.

In order to produce scholarship that will be enduring, the onus is on social mediaresearchers to describe the technological artifact that they are analyzing with as muchcare as survey researchers take in describing the population sampled, and with as muchdetail as ethnographers use when describing their field site. This is not to say thatresearchers must continue to describe technologies as if no one knows what they are—weare beyond the point where researchers must explain how electronic mail or “email” islike or unlike postal mail. But, rather, researchers must clearly describe the socio-technical context of the particular site, service, or application their scholarship isaddressing. In addition to attending to the technology itself, and the interchange betweentechnical and social processes, we believe SNS researchers should make a concertedeffort to include the date of data collection and to describe the site at the moment of datacollection and the relevant practices of its users. These descriptions will enable laterresearchers to synthesize across studies to identify patterns, much in the same wayreporting exact effect sizes allows for future meta-analyses

CSCW has been investigating the relationship of time and work practically from its inception as a scholarly fiel