Virtual ethnography

Abstract

Museums and other commemorative sites rely on their websites to represent their mission, exhibits, and other information for potential visitors. These representations change through time requiring researchers interested in such change to work with Internet archival services. Using changes in how enslaved people are represented at plantation tourism sites in the United States as their case study, Candace Bright and David Butler provide a detailed procedure for finding, capturing, and quantitatively analyzing past versions of websites found on the Wayback Machine™, an Internet site that allows researchers to explore billions of web pages archived since 1996.