Any form of digital activity leaves behind metadata that can tell us a lot about actions, intentions, motivations, networks, finances, and social relations. This data produced by the tools we use daily (social networks, browsers, routers, etc.) is extremely useful to anyone who wishes to take advantage of this mass of information for the purposes of analysis, forecasting, or the exertion of diverse forms of control. The Digital Archeology track teaches how to excavate and explore the data that can respond to the most important contemporary questions.

A substantial part of such investigations can be described as a kind of “digital archeology,” as digital traces do not disappear when a website ceases to exist. Indeed, digital vestiges of forgotten information operations that happened 10 years ago are still available, even if all the contents have disappeared from the Internet. This makes it possible to establish detailed chronologies and trace the biographies of some entrepreneurs of influence.

Our tools and methods will help with exploring almost any social phenomenon that has ever been present on the Internet.

Investigative journalism is often associated with sensationalist revelations, while in fact it is a system of monitoring tools that analyzes abnormalities and changes, and it dives into the exploration of those anomalies.

Known as OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence), these techniques and their results have been popularized by the work of investigative teams such as Bellingcat or Forensic Architecture on various sensitive topics. If such investigations are common in some technical and journalistic communities, they have been underused by social scientists. In most cases, investigations are mobilized as external sources and not as a part of the demonstration  per se. This epistemological limitation tends to relegate OSINT to the status of a documentation technique. We, however, argue that it has a role to play in conceptual matters and in developing new digital fieldwork for the study of Russia.