ABSTRACT
The Introduction takes as point of departure that there has been very little contact between some of the main academic strands working with digital material, namely ‘digital humanities’ and ‘internet studies’/‘new media studies’, including web archives studies. It is argued that it is important to engage in discussions between the digital humanities and web archive studies with a view to debating how the different forms of digital material (digitised, born digital, or reborn digital) can be studied and how different methods and approaches can mutually enrich each other, regardless of which label is attached to them. In addition, it is argued that a relevant place to start such debates is to focus on one of the largest entities of the web, namely transnational web domains such as the French, British, or European web. Finally, the Introduction highlights some of the major challenges that a web archive scholar has to address, including methodological and theoretical discussions that both illustrate the potential of studying the web, in this case national web domains, and serve as an inspiration to scholars who want to connect the digital humanities and web archive studies, including web historiography.
