Herding the ‘Performing Elephants:’ Using Computational Methods to Study Usenet

This article discusses the methodological and ethical challenges associated with doing research using Usenet archives, drawing on the author’s experience using files from the Internet Archive’s Usenet Historical Collection to study early use of the term “cisgender” in five English language transgender-related newsgroups, as well as building the Transgender Usenet Archive. In particular, researchers face three challenges: accounting for the different platforms and interfaces through which users could access Usenet, contextualizing newsgroups within their contemporaneous topic-specific discursive sphere, and accounting for the ethical concerns of working with message metadata. Each of these challenges shaped the author’s research: transgender newsgroups could not be studied individually, but as a niche “discursive sphere” within Usenet. Users had a variety of access points into this sphere, which shaped their particular reading and posting practices. Lastly, all identifying data were removed from all public-facing copies of this research.