Selected Papers of #AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Philadelphia, PA, USA / 18-21 Oct 2023 Suggested Citation (APA): de Coning, A. (2023, October). Using “Small Data” to map how men’s rights came online. Paper presented at AoIR2023: The 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Philadelphia, PA, USA: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. USING “SMALL DATA” TO MAP HOW MEN’S RIGHTS CAME ONLINE Alexis de Coning West Virginia Wesleyan College The digital turn provides social movement researchers with numerous opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, born-digital materials, digital archives, and computational methods allow us to study how social movements use Internet technologies to network, disseminate messages, build community, and recruit new members. On the other hand, we are often frustrated by both the abundance and scarcity of data, especially for historical research (Nanni, 2019). While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a “revolution” in how social movements communicate and organize – for instance, through connective action (Bennet & Segerberg, 2013) – digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a “revolution” in how we study these movements or their histories (Nanni, 2019). It is thus unsurprising that some researchers “have questioned the idea that bigger is necessarily better” (Milligan, 2019a, p. 9) when studying social movements online. Furthermore, big data analysis often requires access to computing resources and skills that are not always available or easily learned by researchers. Furthermore, archival materials are often “messy”: print materials cannot always be easily converted to digital formats for optical character recognition (OCR), and digital archival materials can be equally cumbersome and difficult to “clean” for computational methods. My paper enters this discussion by suggesting a “small data” approach for studying the early digital presence of social movements. In my case, a “small data” approach refers to collecting a preliminary dataset by manually trawling through print and digital archive materials, using simple spreadsheets to track the data, and Google My Maps to visualize the data. I focus on the men’s rights movement’s transition from print to digital media. The men’s rights movement refers to the “diverse range of groups and individuals who believe that the dignity and rights of men and boys are diminished, threatened, or non-existent” (de Coning, 2020, p. 1). Men’s rights activists often blame feminists in particular, and sometimes women in general, for their perceived lack of rights. This social movement has gained notoriety in recent years with events like #Gamergate (2014) or misogynist- incel attacks (Kelly, DiBranco, & DeCook, 2021), and its proponents are often associated with “extremely online” and “toxic” masculinities. However, the movement’s history and adoption of Internet technologies remain understudied. Here, I use two unique datasets to demonstrate how the men’s rights movement in North America transitioned from print-based communication to digital spaces in the early 1990s, and how these communities were often geographically well-positioned to do so. My first dataset uses print archival materials from the Changing Men collection at Michigan State University to map the locations of men’s rights groups across North America. Men’s rights newsletters and zines often dedicated space in their publications to list other publications and organizations — typically with contact numbers and postal addresses (see Fig. 1). I draw specifically on the “Directory Lists” included in the prominent men’s rights zine The Backlash! from October 1993 to October 1994 to pinpoint the locations of men’s rights groups, publications, and organizations operating during this time (see Fig. 2). My second dataset draws on the Usenet Historical Collection, hosted by The Internet Archive, and the men’s rights newsgroup alt.mens-rights in particular. Working through the archived newsgroup chronologically, I collected a dataset of 100 posts (spanning September – November 1994). While each post contains the written content of the message, I focus on the metadata attached to these posts. Of the initial dataset of 100 posts, I identified 83 unique users; of these, 24 had no clear location data and were removed from the dataset. However, the remaining posts include 59 users with university, organizational, or corporate email addresses that allowed me to locate them to some extent; while these email addresses are not an accurate representation of where users were located at the time of accessing the newsgroup, they do indicate the geographical areas where alt.mens-rights participants were located when first accessing Usenet. Additionally,10 users provided included their full addresses in their post signatures (see Fig. 3). By comparing the geographical information across the two datasets (see Fig. 4), I demonstrate how: 1) there is significant overlap between the print organizations and alt.mens-rights users; and 2) men’s rights communities in North America were often concentrated in areas like Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the North Eastern Seaboard. This is important for several reasons. First, it suggests that the movement’s transition to digital media was impacted by its proximity to Internet infrastructures and the typically middle-class, university-educated populations who had access to this technology in the early 1990s. I thus provide a more definitive picture of the men’s rights activists who “pioneered” the movement’s current digital manifestations. Second, I demonstrate how print materials aided the movement’s transition online by providing “pre-digital networks” that presaged its digital networks. Finally, this paper acknowledges specific challenges and potential problems with this approach. First, the sensitive nature of the metadata raises ethical concerns about its use (see Dame-Griff, 2019; Milligan, 2019b; Kollock & Smith, 2005). For this reason, I have anonymized the data and removed any identifying information about alt.mens- rights users from the paper. Second, the data is preliminary; further research will expand both datasets to provide a more robust and rigorous analysis of the transition to digital media discussed here. Third, my small data approach suggests a critical re- evaluation of the methods and tools available to researchers using archives. As Nanni argues, it is imperative for historians to “go beyond an unquestioned adoption of the new sources and tools at their disposal” and “instead critically employ them, in search of new historical perspectives” (2019, p. 122). However, I am not proposing that big data and computational methods are not valuable, or that potential mixed-methods collaborations could not be fruitful. Furthermore, as with print archives, digital archives are often incomplete and represent only a portion of the people who may have had access to the Internet at a particular time. Thus, researchers making use of “small data” must be vigilant about selection bias and the representativeness of their data (Milligan, 2019b, p. 85). Nonetheless, my research provides an opportunity to think critically and creatively about the digital revolution, and how small data (both analog and digital) can still be valuable to researchers studying social movements online. Figure 1: Directory List extract from the October 1993 edition of The Backlash! which lists men’s rights organizations across North America. Figure 2: The locational data from my first dataset using organizational addresses published in The Backlash! between October 1993 – October 1994. Figure 3: The locational data from my second dataset using university, organizational, or corporate email addresses, as well as post signatures, collected from alt.mens-rights between September – November 1994. Figure 4: Overlaying the two maps. References Bennet, W.L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge University Press. Dame-Griff, A. (2019). Herding the ‘performing elephants’: Using computational methods to study Usenet. Internet Histories 3:3-4, 223-244. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2019.1652456 de Coning, A. (2020). Men’s rights movement/activism. In: Ross, K., Bachman, I., Cardo, V., Moorti, S., and Scarcelli, M. (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. doi: 10.1002/9781119429128. Kelly, M., DiBranco, A., & DeCook, J. (2021). Misogynist incels and male supremacism: Overview and recommendations for addressing the threat of male supremacist violence. New America. Retrieved from https://www.newamerica.org/political- reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ Kollock, P. & Smith, M.A. (2005). Communities in cyberspace. In M.A. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace (pp. 3-24). Routledge. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/misogynist-incels-and-male-supremacism/ Milligan, I. (2019a). Historiography and the web. In N. Brügger & I. Milligan (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Web History (pp. 3 – 15). SAGE Publications Ltd. Milligan, I. (2019b). History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Nanni, F. (2019). Collecting primary sources from web archives: A tale of scarcity and abundance. In N. Brügger & I. Milligan (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Web History (pp. 112-124). SAGE Publications Ltd.