Conference Agenda

The Call for Papers for WAC 2024 was announced on the 20th anniversary of the forming of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), a conscious nod to the importance of history in understanding the context of contemporary web archiving. One cannot understand web archives without understanding not only the broader context of the time in which they were created, but the broader historical context of why and how web archiving organizations developed and how particular approaches to web archiving were adopted. Yet histories of web archiving are often quick and somewhat rote. A nod towards the Internet Archive and a few other national libraries launching web archiving projects in 1996, perhaps a glimpse to the Wayback Machine in 2001, and occasionally the IIPC’s 2003 founding.

In my presentation, I provide discussion around the origin moment of web archiving. Why did web archiving begin at the Internet Archive, the National Library of Canada, the Swedish National Library, the Dutch Royal Library, and the Australian National Library all roughly at the same time? I argue that 1994-1996 witnessed a process that built a social and cultural consensus about web archiving.

My presentation argues that the 1990s transformed a debate which had been largely happening within record management and within the archival profession throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and propelled it into public conciseness through the conscious framing of a “digital dark age.” This concept made concerns around digital obsolescence seem like a problem that was not just for the Fortune 500 and governments, but all of society. Ideas spread outwards from academic venues and fora such as the 1994-1996 Task Force on Digital Archiving and research libraries to have broader social and cultural impact.

Between 1995 and 1998, a series of individuals – including science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold, information scholar Margaret Hedstrom, technologist Brewster Kahle, documentarian Terry Sanders, and Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand – reshaped the cultural conversation to broaden digital preservation from an academic field to one understood as having wide-ranging implications. This would not just be the preservation of technical or corporate documents, but rather the collective digital memory of our society.

Why does this fit with this conference? Curators and users of web archives need to understand the broader historical context which gave rise to their programs, and this can help understand ways in which to motivate it today. When we speak of a “digital dark age” in 2023, we are drawing on an intellectual conversation stretching back 30 years. My goal is that practitioners and researchers, with a better understanding of their history, will be well positioned to explain the value of their programs today.

This presentation discuss how we can analyse the historical development of the form of websites based on the holdings in web archives. In other words: what can we say about a website's form, no matter which concrete words, images, graphics, videos and sounds it conveys?

Focus is on the following topics that can help us understand the formal characteristics of a website:

• delimiting the website in space and time by striking the balance between having a website with most web pages, and keeping it temporally consistent,
• including the web pages that were not archived, but linked to,
• size (number of web pages), and structure (broad/deep website),
• word-heaviness (number of words in total and on average per web page),
• image-heaviness (number of images in total and on average per web page),
• menu items (number of main-/submenu items, vertical/horisontal),
• length of web pages.

The formal characteristics of websites are important to study historically since they constitute the changing framings of the content and the use.

Inspiration: Theoretically the presentation is informed by the monograph The Form of News (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), in which the authors analyse the various elements that have historically played into making the news look as they have done, and how these forms have changed from 1750 to 2000, including analyses of the role of pictures, the front page, the overall format and design, etc. The presentation investigates how such an analysis would look like if the web is the object of study, keeping the specificities of the archived web in mind (Brügger, 2018). Also, the presentation is inspired by the seminal work of Byrne about the use of the archived web as a source to study football history (Byrne, 2020).

Context: The presentation takes its point of departure in the ongoing research project "Becoming professional: The web presence of Danish Superliga clubs 1996-2021". Part of this analysis is a detailed analysis of the formal development af the soccer club's official websites.

Data: The study is based on the holdings of the national Danish web archive Netarkivet. As for the study's first years Netarkivet's material is constituted by an ingest of relevant Danish websites acquired from the Internet Archive.

Methods: Quantitative methods, using the software Orange, and manual coding.

Contribution: The presentation contributes to the fields of researcher use of web archives as well as to web history by demonstrating how web archives can be used in the study of the development of the web as such and of cultural phenomena in the context of web archives such as the communicative use of the web by sports clubs. As a side effect the presentation also indicates how one can study the completeness of what is archived.

References

Barnhurst, K.G., Nerone, J. (2001). The Form of News: A history. New York/London: The Guildford Press.

Brügger, N. (2018). The archived web: Doing history in the digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Byrne, H. (2020). Reviewing football history through the UK Web Archive, Soccer & Society, 21(4), 461-474, DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2020.1751474

This presentation aims to showcase the importance of context when analyzing the archived web, may it be for a research on a specific topic using web archives as a primary source, for a particular period – for example, the web of the 1990s– or for the analysis of a diachronic study of a particular website.

The presentation will be based on my experience using web archives for my PhD research on Digital Cultures and their development in Luxembourg from the 1990s to the present day. One of my case studies aims to analyze the origins of e-government and e-citizens in the country. In order to do that, I mapped the communes that had a website in the 1990s and early 2000s, identified their main objectives, and analyzed how they evolved over the years towards greater participation of citizens.

In concrete, this presentation will focus on the analysis of the website of the Ville de Luxembourg (www.vdl.lu) and what additional context is needed to conduct this research through web archives. Based on the challenges I faced during the diachronic analysis of this website using different web archives, such as the Internet Archive, arquivo.pt and the National Library of Luxembourg web archives, I will discuss the needs, strategies, and requests in terms of contextualization, documentation, and metadata, as well as discoverability and incompleteness of data. I will also underline what would be needed in terms of interoperability between web archives.

The need for greater contextualization of the data context and more documentation and descriptive metadata (Milligan, 2020; Webster, 2017; Brügger, Schafer, Geeraert, Isbergue & Chambers, 2020; Venlet et al., 2018; Vlassenroot et al., 2019, among others) is a recurrent request of web archives researchers. The case study aims to demonstrate the practical challenges when analyzing a website and the importance of contextualization and documentation, especially when facing information loss and working with several web archives.

References

Milligan, I. (2020). You Shouldn't Need to Be a Web Historian to Use Web Archives: Lowering Barriers to Access Through Community and Infrastructure. Newark New Jersey USA: WARCnet. https://doi.org/10.1145/2910896.2910913

Webster, P. (2017). Users, technologies, organisations: Towards a cultural history of world web archiving. In N. Brügger & N. (Eds.), Web 25. Histories from 25 years of the World Wide Web (pp. 175–190). New York: Peter Lang.

Brügger, N., Schafer, V., Geeraert, F., Isbergue, N., & Chambers, S. (2020). Exploring the 20-year evolution of a research community: Web-archives as essential sources for historical research. Bladen voor documentatie/Cahiers de la documentation, 2, 62-72. http://hdl.handle.net/10993/43903

Vlassenroot, E., Chambers S., Di Pretoro E., Geeraert, F., Haesendonck G., Michel A., & Mechant, P. (April 1, 2019). Web Archives as a Data Resource for Digital Scholars. International Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1: 85–111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00007-7

Venlet, J., Farrell, K. S., Kim, T., O'Dell, A. J., & Dooley, J. (2018). Descriptive Metadata for Web Archiving: Literature Review of User Needs. https://doi.org/10.25333/C33P7Z