I have written a guide for conducting algorithmic ethnography, which I am considering a more technically informed version of cyber-ethnography. It takes algorithms as both a method for ethnographic immersion and as analytical objects. In this brief outline, I try to demonstrate the ways in which I think and algorithmically-conscious and algorithmically-oriented form of cyber-ethnography can produce more robust results for researchers, understanding it as a process-driven, multipronged, multimedia, multiplatform version of ethnographic inquiry. I demonstrate where some of my initial thoughts have come from by providing an example from my own work: QAnon. While I think my analysis of QAnon is more limited here, it’s important insofar as it demonstrates the potential of this method, and it is an invitation for more researchers to engage in such a method.

Here it is.