How should platforms be archived? On sustainable use practices of a Telegram Archive to study Russia’s war against Ukraine

Abstract

After Russia’s war against Ukraine destroyed people’s ability to move and communicate freely in Ukraine, many Ukrainians turned to social media and messenger apps, especially Telegram, to produce and share information. The vast amount of this digital data is privatized, ephemeral, and difficult to utilize for research, raising urgent questions about its sustainable accessibility and usability. In this article, we explore a specific aspect of digital archive sustainability – the use of digital archives to preserve platform data related to Russia’s war against Ukraine – by focusing on data integrity, usability, and ethics. Our research is based on a case study of an interdisciplinary Data Sprint, “Russia’s War in Ukraine,” organized in collaboration with a Telegram Archive, in which academics and practitioners investigated qualitative approaches to studying a war on Telegram. In the article, we explore the possibilities and drawbacks of sustainable use of the Telegram Archive for qualitative approaches – semantic, visual, spatial, and link analysis – to working with large amounts of data. We argue that the sustainability of digital archives depends not only on their use, based on consistently stored and accessible data, but also the ethical aspects of their use for diverse research needs.