ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

Digital humanities, the web, and national web domains

part 1|62 pages

Collecting and preserving a national web domain

chapter 1|16 pages

The historic context of web archiving and the web archive

Reconstructing and saving the Dutch national web using historical methods

chapter 3|19 pages

Studying the web in the shadow of Uncle Sam

The case of the .ca domain

part 2|71 pages

Methodological challenges

chapter 6|21 pages

National web histories at the fringe of the web

Palestine, Kosovo, and the quest for online self-determination

chapter 7|14 pages

Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web

Lessons from cross-border religion in the northern Irish web sphere

chapter 8|19 pages

Establishing a corpus of the archived web

The case of the Danish web from 2005 to 2015

part 3|45 pages

Results and dissemination

chapter 10|17 pages

The nation is in the network

Locating a national museum online

chapter 11|10 pages

A national Web Trend Index