A Cyber-archaeology Approach to Social Movement Research: Framework and Case Study

This paper presents a cyber-archaeology approach to social movement research. The approach overcomes many of the issues of scale and complexity facing social research in the Internet, enabling broad and longitudinal study of the virtual communities supporting social movements. Cultural cyber-artifacts of significance to the social movement are collected and classified using automated techniques, enabling analysis across multiple related virtual communities. Approaches to the analysis of cyber-artifacts are guided by perspectives of social movement theory. A case study on a broad group of related social movement virtual communities is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the framework, and provide a detailed instantiation of the proposed approach for evaluation.