Conference Agenda

The Belgian web began in June 1988 when EARN and Eunet introduced the .be domain. In December 1993 the first .be domain names were registered and in 1994 there were a total of 129 registered .be names.[1] Documentation about the early Belgian web is scarce and the topic has not yet been researched in depth. In other European countries such as France and The Netherlands, specific projects have been set up to document the early national web. [2] This study of the early Belgian web therefore helps to complete the history of the early web in Europe and understand the specific dynamics that led to the emergence of the web in Belgium.

Records of the early Web Belgium include: published lists of domain names of interest to Belgians held in the collections of KBR (e.g. publications such as the Belgian Web Directory published from 1997 to 1998 and the Web Directory published from 1998 to 2000), archived early Belgian websites preserved in the Wayback Machine since 1996, archives of organisations such as DNS Belgium (the registry for the .be, .brussels and .vlaanderen domains) etc.

This archival information provides a slice of the information needed to understand the emergence of the early web in Belgium, yet it is clear that social actors who played key roles in developing the Belgian web, are not always recorded in the few archival records that remain. By combining these “paper traces” of the early Belgian web with semi-structured interviews with key actors in Belgium (e.g. long-time employees of DNS Belgium, instigators of the .be domain name, first users of and researchers on the web) we are able to reconstruct the history of the start of the web in Belgium.

In this presentation, we will report on this research that stitches the first traces of the early Belgian web.

[1] DNS Belgium. (2019). De historiek van DNS Belgium. Available online at: https://www.dnsbelgium.be/nl/over-dns-belgium/de-historiek-van-dns-belgium.

[2] De Bode, P., Teszelszky, K. (2018). Web collection internet archaeology Euronet-Internet (1994-2017). Available online at: https://lab.kb.nl/dataset/web-collection-internet-archaeology-euronet-internet-1994-2017; Bibliothèque nationale de France. (2018). Web90 - Patrimoine, Mémoires et Histoire du Web dans les années 1990. Available online at: https://web90.hypotheses.org/tag/bnf.

Many amateurs and professionals writers have taken to the web since its very beginning, to share their writings and personal diaries, engaging themselves in the first forums. These practices increased with the rise of blogging platforms in the 2000s. Authors have used hypertext link possibilities to develop a new digital sociability and a common transnational creative network.

The Lifranum research project brings together researchers from several disciplines. Its objective is to provide an original platform within a thematic web archive as corpora and to develop enhanced search features. The indexing scheme takes into account advances in automatic style analysis. In this context, researchers and librarians have defined complementary needs considering the web archive collection to be built and have tested new methods to design the corpora and carry out the crawls.

During this presentation, we will share the challenges we encountered and the experiences we developed during the building of this large thematic corpora, from the selection phase to the crawl processes. The following aspects will be discussed:

- text indexing and text analyzing issues;

- large thematic corpora building methods using Hyphe, a tool developed by SciencesPo for exploring the web, build corpora, analyze links between websites and adding annotations;

- managing quantity and quality on blogging platforms;

- documenting choices to proceed data.

The presentation will also compare web archive logics to scientific approaches focused on a specific type of data (text, image, video) that are exposed using APIs and easier to analyze. We will question the contributions and limits of this type of collection launched in partnership within the framework of a research project, which enriches the archives due to more methodical explorations of the web, anticipated qualitative controls and production of reusable documentation.

The video will be available in French with English subtitles.

In this presentation, we explore the development of a reborn digital archival edition (RDAE) as a hybrid approach for the collection, organisation, and analysis of reborn digital materials (Brügger, 2018; 2016) that are accessible through public web archives. Brügger (2016) describes reborn digital media, as media that has been collected and preserved and has undergone a change due to this process such as emulations of computer games or materials in a web archive. Further to this, we explore the potential of an RDAE as a method to enable the sharing and reuse of such data. As part of this we use a case study of the press/media statements of Irish politician, poet, and sociologist, Michael D. Higgins from 2002-2011. For the most part, these press statements were once available on the website of Michael D. Higgins, who is the current serving Irish President since 2011. Higgin’s website disappeared from the live web, sometime after the 2011 Presidential Election took place (27 October 2011), and sometime before Higgins was inaugurated (11 November 2011). Using the NLI Web Archive (National Library of Ireland) and the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), this project sought to find and collect traces of these press statements and bring them together as an RDAE. In doing so, we use Zotero open-source citation management software, for collecting, organising, and analysing the data (archived web pages). We extract the text, and use screenshot software to capture an image of the archived web page. Thereafter, we utilise Omeka open-source software as a platform for presenting the data (screenshot/metadata/transcription) as a curated thematic collection of reborn digital materials, offering search and discovery functions through free text search, metadata fields and subject headings. To end, we use DROID open-source software for organising the data for long-term preservation, and Open Science Framework as a platform for sharing derivative materials and datasets.

References:

Brügger, N. (2016). Digital Humanities in the 21st Century: Digital Material as a Driving Force. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10(2). Retrieved from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000256/000256.html

Brügger, N. (2018). The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age. The MIT Press.