Engaging with the syuzhet: A new methodological approach to analyzing and visualizing internet discourse

The dynamic nature of written communication using the internet has provided the ethnographic community with a rich source of data to sample and analyze. While the past century has seen considerable development in methodological approaches to sampling and analyzing texts written with ink on paper, the constantly evolving textual landscape of the internet has yet to be fully understood. In this paper, we advocate a new approach to internet texts where researchers move beyond the ‘ink and paper’ paradigm and embrace the internet as a medium unto itself. To do this, we engage with the narrative concept of fabula and syuzhet as pioneered by Russian Formalists Viktor Schklovsky and Vladimir Propp. We offer an innovative approach to interpretive, internet-based digital ethnography that will help scholars develop multimodal timelines which account for both the linear unfolding of significant temporal events and the non-linear unfolding of meaning-making that key actors in those events generate. Our new approach to timelining in digital ethnography allows researchers to follow and catalog each author’s unique set of links as they interact with other authors and socially construct a shared understanding of events. The method we have outlined here engages the intertextual potential of the internet as a way of seeing, linking online spaces to the ethnographic community’s longstanding interest in modes of communication that capture the lived experiences of people