Abstract

RODRIGUES, Celeste  and  SIMOES, Deolinda. How can sociolinguistic data be used?. Diacrítica [online]. 2013, vol.27, n.1, pp.287-308. ISSN 0807-8967.

Our paper addresses the ethical and legal issues related to the display of the speech data included in sociolinguistic data bases, considering in detail the case of CPE-Var, a corpus of European Portuguese collected by the first author. Privacy, consent, data integrity, anonymisation, authorship, copyright and related topics are addressed. We provide general background of sociolinguistic data bases, discussion of the possible uses of the data, discussion of the consequences of misuse of the data, besides the relevant support to appropriate scientific use of CPE-Var data. Most ethical and legal questions arise when data are to be used outside the main scope of the initial research project. Even though the legal framework covers the first objective of the research, it is questionable if some other research proposals are also covered by the consent obtained. Our conclusion is that some further uses of CPE-Var data are legitimate, but others must be cautiously avoided or discarded.

Keywords : ethic and legal rights; sociolinguistic databases; privacy; informed consent; authorship; copyright.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in English     · English ( pdf )