Online Dating as Pandora's Box: Methodological Issues for the CSCW Community.

As a socio-technical phenomenon, online dating has significant appeal to researchers interested in various aspects of human-computer interaction -- presentation of self in online environments; norms of disclosure and deception; and the extent to which technological design informs dynamics of human relationships. With these many facets of socio-technical practice come important and complex methodological questions, where both the sensitivity of the topic and the specific technologies being studied can introduce practical and ethical obstacles. This panel brings together scholars across human computer interaction, communication, information studies, and Internet studies to examine methodological issues that have arisen in their own work on online dating, with the objective of broadening these issues of ethics and methods to the wider CSCW community.