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