Web Archaeology: An Introduction (original) (raw)

TMG Journal for Media History

At the end of the twentieth century, when the scale and scope of the web was still limited compared to now, Roy Rosenzweig urged historians to acknowledge the increasing importance of the internet 'as a standard feature of everyday life'. 1 Roughly two decades later, historian Jane Winters concluded that, since the historical distance concerning the web 'is beginning to look like a reasonable chronological span', a more active embracing of doing web history might be appropriate. 2 That call is taken up more and more by scholars, recognising not just the web as a phenomenon with a past of which the history needs to be written, but also as a medium, that produces highly relevant historical sources about almost every aspect of society. Last decade, several books were published, a variety of specialised blogs were written, new peer reviewed journals started and dedicated conferences were held. 3 Together, these research activities demonstrate the potential of this field, varying from theoretical and methodological explorations to concrete case studies on the history of online pornography, of spam, of memes, or of the home page. Other histories address the emergence of webcam cultures in the nineties, the disappearance of the once very popular website GeoCities, but also the steady rise of online white nationalism online. Many of these web histories deal with challenges that are related to issues of web archiving. They address questions such as: What are web archives, what do they collect or what have they collected so far and how do they differ from traditional (media) archives? While archiving the web is gradually acknowledged as a very important act in saving our cultural memory, the implications and critical understanding of what this act means for the type of collections or the type of sources produced, still needs further analysis. As web historian Ian Milligan observes in his recent book History in the Age of Abundance. How the Web is Transforming Historical Research: 'Web archives are not traditional archives not in content, form or conception.' 4 In addition, web archives are historical entities themselves, shaped over the years by changing conceptions of the web. Richard Rogers has described how specific historiographical points of view are built into web archives. 5 For instance, early web archives tried to collect and preserve single websites, while recently the focus has shifted to saving national web domains. An urgent issue that Rogers addresses is the prospects for archiving social media. As he admits, the first responsibility is the user herself who posts her vlog, selfie or tweet, but there are also institutional responsibilities for safeguarding our shared online presence. In any case, crawling and archiving social media through platforms like Facebook or Instagram will raise many issues related to size and scope, including technical problems, privacy issues and deliberate infrastructural hurdles. As Ian Milligan explains, these platforms should be seen as 'walled ecosystems' that might resist being