Archives for the Dark Web: A Field Guide for Study

This chapter provides a field guide for other digital humanists who want to study the Dark Web. In order to focus the chapter, I emphasize my belief that, in order to study the cultures of Dark Web sites and users, the digital humanist must engage with these systems' technical infrastructures. I will provide specific reasons why I believe that understanding the technical details of Freenet, Tor, and I2P will benefit any researchers who study these systems, even if they focus on end users, aesthetics, or Dark Web cultures. To this end, I offer a catalog of archives and resources researchers could draw on and a discussion of why researchers should build their own archives. I conclude with some remarks about ethics of Dark Web research

Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

In holistic Digital Humanities studies of information infrastructure, we cannot rely solely on the selection of any given techniques from various disciplines. In addition to selecting our research methods pragmatically, for their relative efficacy at answering a part of a research question, we must also attend to the way in which those methods complement or contradict one another. In my study on West African network backbone infrastructure, I use the tools of different humanities, social-sciences, and computer science disciplines depending not only on the type of information that they help glean, but also on how they can build upon one another as I move through the phases of the study. Just as the architecture of information infrastructure includes discrete “layers” of machines, processes, human activity, and concepts, so too does the study of that architecture allow for multiple layers of abstraction and assumption, each a useful part of a unified, interdisciplinary approach