CRITICAL CARE & THE EARLY WEB: ETHICAL DIGITAL METHODS FOR ARCHIVED YOUTH DATA

This paper demonstrates an ethico-methodological approach toresearching archived web pages created by young people throughout 1994-2005 that wascollected and stored by the Internet Archive. Rather than deploying a range of computationaltools available for collecting web data in the Internet Archive, my approach to thismaterial has been to start with the person: I recruited participants through social mediawho remembered creating websites or participating in web communities when they were youngerand were interested in attempting to relocate their digital traces. In a series ofqualitative, online semi-structured interviews, I guided participants through the WaybackMachine’s interface and directed them towards where their materials might be stored. Iadapted this approach from the walkthrough method, where I position the participant asco-investigator and analyst of web archival material, enabling simultaneous discovery,memory, interpretation and investigation. Together, we walk through the abandoned sites andruins of a once-vibrant online community as they reflect and remember the early web. Thisapproach responds to significant ethical gaps in web archival research and engages withfeminist ethics of care (Luka & Millette, 2018) inspired by conceptual framing of datamaterials in research on the "right to be forgotten” (Crossen-White, 2015; GDPR, 2018;Tsesis, 2014), digital afterlives (Sutherland, 2020), indigenous data sovereignty andgovernance (Wemigwans, 2018), and the Feminist Data Manifest-No (Cifor et al, 2019). Thismethod re-centers the human and moves towards a digital justice approach (Gieseking, 2020;Cowan & Rault, 2020) for engaging with historical youth data.