Writing web histories with an eye on the analog past (original) (raw)

When the Present Web is Later the Past: Web Historiography, Digital History, and Internet Studies

Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung

Taking as point of departure that since the mid-1990s the web has been an essential medium within society as well as in academia this article addresses some fundamental questions related to web historiography, that is the writing of the history of the web. After a brief identification of some limitations within digital history and internet studies vis-a-vis web historiography it is argued that the web is in itself an important historical source, and that special attention must be drawn to the web in web archives - termed reborn-digital material - since these sources will probably be the only web left for future historians. In line with this argument the remainder of the article discusses the following methodological issues: What characterizes the reborn-digital material in web archives, and how does this affect the historian's use of the material as well as the possible application of digital analytical tools on this kind of material?

The Web As Television Reimagined? Online Networks and the Pursuit of Legacy Media

Journal of Communication Inquiry

Television's perceived weakness at the turn of the century opened a rhetorical and economic space for entrepreneurs eager to curate and distribute web programs. These companies introduced various forms of experimentation they associated with the advantages of digital technologies, but they also maintained continuity with television's business practices. This dialectic between old and new, continuity and change, insiders and outsiders, reflected the instability of television as a concept and the promise of the web as an alternative. Using articles in the trade press, this essay explores the history of episodic web programming-variously called web series, webisodes, bitcoms, web television and, in its earliest form, cybersoaps-as new media network executives hoped to replicate but also differentiate themselves from legacy media.

The web as history: Using web archives to understand the past and the present

The World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today’s principal source of information, entertainment and much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe ‘if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist’. While this statement is not entirely true, it is becoming increasingly accurate, and re ects the Web’s role as an indispensable treasure trove. It is curious, therefore, that historians and social scientists have thus far made little use of the Web to investigate historical patterns of culture and society, despite making good use of letters, novels, newspapers, radio and television programmes, and other pre-digital artefacts. This volume argues that now is the time to ask what we have learnt from the Web so far. The 12 chapters explore this topic from a number of interdisciplinary angles – through histories of national web spaces and case studies of di erent government and media domains – as well as an Introduction that provides an overview of this exciting new area of research.

Inside – Outside. Web History and the Ambivalent Relationship between Old and New Media.

2012

This paper argues that the societal perception of the web and of changes to it over the course of time forms a relevant part of web history. Moreover, the particular perception of the web is to a large extent affected by the traditional media. Against this background the study analyses on a historical basis the content of the traditional media, i.e. newspapers and journals, dealing with topics related to the web. The results of the study foster the assumption that – at least in Germany – traditional media coverage on the Internet and digital media and today social media as well is strongly influenced by a competition between the old and the new media. At the same time the results of the Austrian data show a more neutral attitude toward the web. In order to assess these differences, further international comparative studies are needed.

Exploring the History of Digital History: Setting an Agenda

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

In 2003 the late American historian and digital history pioneer Roy Rosenzweig wrote that historians were confronted with a "fundamental paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance" (Rosenzweig 2003). As more and more historical sources were digitised, Rosenzweig argued that historians urgently needed to rethink their practices. To this day, this diagnosis remains a defining characteristic of doing history after the digital turn. Yet the problem of technologically induced abundance in historical research is far from new. During one of the first computing in the humanities conferences at Yale University in 1965, a predecessor of Rosenzweig, Hayward Alker, already spoke about the need to confront "problems of abundance" in historical research due to the availability of "masses of [digital] historical data" (Alker 1965). This is only one of many possible examples that can serve to illustrate a broader point: key epistemological and methodological questions in what we now call 'digital history' were already debated decades ago by earlier generations of computing historians, yet this is often forgotten. Such forgetfulness is not exclusive to the discipline of history, however, but a consequence of the fact that "the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic" (Nyhan, Flinn and Welsh 2015). As a result, much discourse about digital humanities in the past twenty years is characterised by a rhetoric of radical newness. This situation has recently begun to change, as interest in the history of the digital humanities is growing. These endeavours can be seen as part of a broader process of consolidating the field by excavating its historical and intellectual underpinnings.

Towards web history: sources, methods and challenges in the digital age ; an introduction

Historical Social Research, 2012

»Auf dem Weg zur Web History. Quellen, Methoden und Herausforderungen im digitalen Zeitalter«. The process of digitization represents a twofold challenge both for historiography in general and, in particular, for historical communication research. Digitization has deeply changed research practice as well as the inter-disciplinary communication and is likely to do so in future. The introduction to the HSR Focus presents the collected contributions, which address a twofold conceptual challenge. In a first part, problems and chances of a contemporary history of digital media are discussed. In the second part the authors leave the level of conceptual considerations and turn towards the already established practice of digitization and the supply of sources in the net.