Ethnography of the Internet, or “netnography” as coined by Robert Kozinets (1995), must take into account every aspect of the participant communities’ online environment. Screenshots may have replaced photographs and typed fieldnotes handwritten ones in the anthropologist's arsenal, but these digital methods cannot fully capture the multimedia experience and hypermedia infrastructure of the Internet we take for granted. Moreover, web pages are unstable and thus unreliable as archives of online interaction which scholars might wish to revisit. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the potential of Scrible, a web browser-based tool which allows for the archiving of web pages, as well as their organization, annotation, and coding, while preserving hypermedia such as links. Moreover, I will argue that scholars of digital humanities must look beyond the broad trends of Big Data and dig more deeply into the small data, which allow for thick descriptions of online communities’ interactions and experiences.
