ABSTRACT
This article discusses the method of web archiving in qualitative social media research. While presenting a number of methodological challenges, social media archives (i.e., complete recordings of posts and comments on given social media) are also highly useful data corpuses for studying the social media users’ communicative practices. Through a theoretical examination of web archiving as a new method enabled by the web itself, and an example-based discussion of the methodological, technical, and ethical challenges of harvesting social media archives, the article discusses the merits and limitations of using social media archives in empirical social media research.
