1st Edition

The Historical Web and Digital Humanities The Case of National Web Domains

Edited By Niels Brügger, Ditte Laursen Copyright 2019
    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    206 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Historical Web and Digital Humanities fosters discussions between the Digital Humanities and web archive studies by focussing on one of the largest entities of the web, namely national and transnational web domains such as the British, French, or European web.



    With a view to investigating whether, and how, web studies and web historiography can inform and contribute to the Digital Humanities, this volume contains a number of case studies and methodological and theoretical discussions that both illustrate the potential of studying the web, in this case national web domains, and provide an insight into the challenges associated with doing so. Commentary on and possible solutions to these challenges are debated within the chapters and each one contributes in its own way to a web history in the making that acknowledges the specificities of the archived web.



    The Historical Web and Digital Humanities will be essential reading for those with an interest in how the past of the web can be studied, as well as how Big Data approaches can be applied to the archived web. As a result, this volume will appeal to academics and students working and studying in the fields of Digital Humanities, internet and media studies, history, cultural studies, and communication.

    List of Figures; List of Tables; Notes on the Editors and Contributors; Introduction: Digital humanities, the web, and national web domains, Niels Brügger & Ditte Laursen; Part One: Collecting and preserving a national web domain; Chapter 1, The historic context of web archiving and the web archive: Reconstructing and saving the Dutch national web using historical methods, Kees Teszelszky; Chapter 2, Towards a national web archive in a federated country: A Belgian case study, Sally Chambers, Peter Mechant & Friedel Geeraert; Chapter 3, Studying the web in the shadow of Uncle Sam: The case of the .ca domain, Ian Milligan & Tom J. Smyth; Chapter 4, The curious case of archiving .eu, Helen Hockx-Yu, Ditte Laursen & Daniel Gomes; Part Two: Methodological challenges; Chapter 5, Negotiating the archives of UK web space, Jane Winters; Chapter 6, National web histories at the fringe of the web: Palestine, Kosovo and the quest for online self-determination, Anat Ben-David; Chapter 7, Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web: Lessons from cross-border religion in the Northern Irish web sphere, Peter Webster; Chapter 8, Establishing a corpus of the archived web: The case of the Danish web from 2005 to 2015, Niels Brügger, Ditte Laursen & Janne Nielsen; Part Three: Results and dissemination; Chapter 9, Exploring the "French Web" of the 1990s, Valérie Schafer; Chapter 10, The nation is in the network: Locating a national museum online, Rebecca Kahn; Chapter 11, A national Web Trend Index, Niels Brügger; Index

    Biography

    Niels Brügger is a professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, in the School of Communication and Culture. In 2000 he co-founded the Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University, and he has headed the Centre since 2010. He has been Head of NetLab, a research infrastructure for the study of the archived web, since 2014. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has authored and (co-)edited a number of publications, among others The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age (2018), The SAGE Handbook of Web History (Ed. with Ian Milligan, 2018), Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web (2017), and The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (Ed. with Ralph Schroeder, 2017). He is co-founder (2017) and managing editor of the international journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Routledge).



    Ditte Laursen is Head of the Department for Digital Cultural Heritage, The Royal Danish Library. She earned her PhD in media studies from University of Southern Denmark, 2006, specialising in young people’s mobile phone communication. In 2007, she became curator and researcher at the Danish State Library. In 2009, she combined her curator position with a postdoctoral research position at DREAM (Danish Research Centre of Advanced Media Materials) with a project on the implementation of digital technologies in museums. As a researcher and curator she has been working with the Danish national web archive for several years, some of them as managing curator. Her interests include collection management, digital humanities, and digital research infrastructures. She is author or co-author of numerous publications on digital archives, social interaction in, around, and across digital media, and users’ engagement with museums and libraries, all published in international peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.