The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age

198 Pages·2018·2.99 MB·English

by  Niels Brügger

The Archived Web
Books by Niels Brügger
Internet Histories (Ed. with G. Goggin, I. Milligan, V. Schafer). London: Routledge,
2018.
Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web (Ed.). New York: Peter
Lang, 2017.
The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (Ed. with
Ralph Schroeder). London: UCL Press, 2017.
Histories of Public Service Broadcasters on the Web (Ed. with M. Burns). New York: Peter
Lang, 2012.
Web History (Ed.). New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Strukturalismus (with O. Vigsø). Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008.
Archiving Websites: General Considerations and Strategies. Aarhus: Centre for Internet
Studies, 2005.
Media History: Theories, Methods, Analysis (Ed. with S. Kolstrup). Aarhus: Aarhus Uni-
versity Press, 2002.
Lyotard, les déplacements philosophiques (Ed. with F. Frandsen, D. Pirotte). Brussels: De
Boeck-Wesmael (Le point philosophique), 1993.
The Archived Web
Doing History in the Digital Age
Niels Brügger
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2018 Niels Brügger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was published with support from Aarhus University Research Foundation.
This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Print-
ed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-0-262-03902-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Doing Web History in the Digital Age 11
2 The Digital and the Web 17
3 Five Analytical Web Strata 31
4 Cases of Web History 41
5 Archiving the Web 73
6 The Web of the Past—Where to Find What? 91
7 The Web of the Past as a Historical Source 103
8 Scholarly Use of the Archived Web 119
9 Toward a Source Criticism of the Archived Web 137
10 On the Edge of the Web 149
11 Conclusion—the Future of Web History 155
Notes 161
References 169
Index 181

Acknowledgments
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
© Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved
In a way, I started writing this book almost two decades ago, just after the
turn of the millennium, when I first realized that my object of study—
the online web—was disappearing before my very eyes. This discovery
started a journey where some of the most important stopovers were my
own experience with small-scale web archiving, my involvement in the
preliminary work that eventually became the national Danish web archive,
Netarkivet, a number of publications about web history, and the outlining
of theoretical and methodological frameworks to help us understand the
archived web.
On my journey I have met many people who have influenced the
thoughts coming together for the first time in this book: my good friend
and former colleague, Niels Ole Finnemann, now a professor at the Univer-
sity of Copenhagen, who was the number one cause of my moving from
French philosophy to media and internet studies, and who has influenced
my thinking on the internet and its history; colleagues in my department at
Aarhus University, who have had to listen to me speak about web archives at
length, without looking as though they were bored; the staff at Netarkivet,
established in 2005 by the State Library in Aarhus and the Royal Library in
Copenhagen, including management, IT specialists, curators, and research-
ers; what it is now fair to consider the international web history commu-
nity, including the many contributors to the books and special issues of
journals I have edited since 2010, as well as participants in conferences
(the two RESAW conferences and others); the Oxford Internet Institute for
hosting me as an Academic Visitor when I started writing this book in 2016,
and its scholars, who asked intriguing questions when the book was only a
PowerPoint presentation. You have all contributed to this book, for which
I owe you thanks.