The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: The Case of National Web Domains

The Historical Web and Digital Humanities fosters discussions between the Digital Humanities and web archive studies by focussing on one of the largest entities of the web, namely national and transnational web domains such as the British, French, or European web.

With a view to investigating whether, and how, web studies and web historiography can inform and contribute to the Digital Humanities, this volume contains a number of case studies and methodological and theoretical discussions that both illustrate the potential of studying the web, in this case national web domains, and provide an insight into the challenges associated with doing so. Commentary on and possible solutions to these challenges are debated within the chapters and each one contributes in its own way to a web history in the making that acknowledges the specificities of the archived web.

The Historical Web and Digital Humanities will be essential reading for those with an interest in how the past of the web can be studied, as well as how Big Data approaches can be applied to the archived web. As a result, this volume will appeal to academics and students working and studying in the fields of Digital Humanities, internet and media studies, history, cultural studies, and communication.

Niels Brügger is a professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, in the School of Communication and Culture. In 2000 he co-founded the Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University, and he has headed the Centre since 2010. He has been Head of NetLab, a research infrastructure for the study of the archived web, since 2014. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has authored and (co-)edited a number of publications, among others The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age (2018), The SAGE Handbook of Web History (Ed. with Ian Milligan, 2018), Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web (2017), and The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (Ed. with Ralph Schroeder, 2017). He is co-founder (2017) and managing editor of the international journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Routledge).

Ditte Laursen is Head of the Department for Digital Cultural Heritage, The Royal Danish Library. She earned her PhD in media studies from University of Southern Denmark, 2006, specialising in young people’s mobile phone communication. In 2007, she became curator and researcher at the Danish State Library. In 2009, she combined her curator position with a postdoctoral research position at DREAM (Danish Research Centre of Advanced Media Materials) with a project on the implementation of digital technologies in museums. As a researcher and curator she has been working with the Danish national web archive for several years, some of them as managing curator. Her interests include collection management, digital humanities, and digital research infrastructures. She is author or co-author of numerous publications on digital archives, social interaction in, around, and across digital media, and users’ engagement with museums and libraries, all published in international peer-reviewed journals and anthologies.