The Web As History. Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present 2017
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Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Niels Brügger, Ralph Schroeder u.a. (Hg.) The Web as History. Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present 2017 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3683 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Buch / book Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Brügger, Niels; Schroeder, Ralph (Hg.): The Web as History. Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present. London: UCL Press 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3683. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911307563 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung 4.0 Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Attribution 4.0 License. For more information see: Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 The Web Web The ‘No other work as cohesively, clearly, forcefully and successfully argues for the Web’s centrality in contemporary society and social science. While scholars of new media tend to turn their attention to the newest and latest new media phenomena, the Web is and will continue to be crucial to understanding online phenomena generally and, just as critically, providing a record of online discourse and events.’ – Steve Jones, UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication, as University of Illinois at Chicago History The World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today’s principal source of information, entertainment and The much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe ‘if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist’. While this statement is not entirely true, it is becoming increasingly accurate, and reflects the Web’s role as an indispensable treasure trove. It is curious, therefore, that historians and social scientists have thus far made little use of the Web to Web investigate historical patterns of culture and society, despite making good use of letters, novels, newspapers, radio and television programmes, and other pre-digital artefacts. This volume argues that now is the time to ask as what we have learnt from the Web so far. The 12 chapters explore this topic from a number of interdisciplinary angles – through histories of national Niels Brügger by Edited web spaces and case studies of different government and media domains – as well as an Introduction that provides an overview of this exciting new History area of research. & Niels Brügger is Professor and Head of the Centre for Internet Studies and Schroeder Ralph of the internet research infrastructure NetLab, Aarhus University. Ralph Schroeder is Professor and Director of the Master’s course in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder Cover design: Liron Gilenberg Free open access versions available from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press £40.00 The Web as History The Web as History Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present Edited by Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder First published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ ucl- press Text © Contributors, 2017 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in captions, 2017 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Common 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder (eds.), The Web as History. London, UCL Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781911307563 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ This book was published with support from the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Aarhus University Research Foundation, and Webster Research and Consulting. ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 42– 6 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 55– 6 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 56– 3 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 58– 7 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 57– 0 (mobi) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 59– 4 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781911307563 Acknowledgements We would like to thank especially Lara Speicher at UCL Press for being a great help, and of course the authors of the volume. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project The Big UK domain data for the Humanities (BUDDAH) with which both editors were involved and which provided the initial impetus for the book. This project is also the basis of several chapters. We would also like to thank the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Aarhus University Research Foundation, and Webster Research and Consulting for contributing to open access publication. v Contents List of figures ix List of tables xii List of contributors xiii Introduction: The Web as History 1 Ralph Schroeder and Niels Brügger PART ONE THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF WEB DOMAINS 1. Analysing the UK web domain and exploring 15 years of UK universities on the web 23 Eric T. Meyer, Taha Yasseri, Scott A. Hale, Josh Cowls, Ralph Schroeder and Helen Margetts 2. Live versus archive: Comparing a web archive to a population of web pages 45 Scott A. Hale, Grant Blank and Victoria D. Alexander 3. Exploring the domain names of the Danish web 62 Niels Brügger, Ditte Laursen and Janne Nielsen PART TWO MEDIA AND GOVERNMENT 4. The tumultuous history of news on the web 83 Matthew S. Weber 5. International hyperlinks in online news media 101 Josh Cowls and Jonathan Bright 6. From far away to a click away: The French state and public services in the 1990s 117 Valérie Schafer vii PART THREE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL HISTORIES 7. Welcome to the web: The online community of GeoCities during the early years of the World Wide Web 137 Ian Milligan 8. Using the web to examine the evolution of the abortion debate in Australia, 2005– 2015 159 Robert Ackland and Ann Evans 9. Religious discourse in the archived web: Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sharia law controversy of 2008 190 Peter Webster 10. ‘Taqwacore is Dead. Long Live Taqwacore’ or punk’s not dead?: Studying the online evolution of the Islamic punk scene 204 Meghan Dougherty 11. Cultures of the UK web 220 Josh Cowls 12. Coda: Web archives for humanities research – some reflections 238 Jane Winters Notes 249 References 256 Index 275 viii CONTENTS List of figures Figure 1.1 Number of nodes (third-level domains) within each second-level domain over time 30 Figure 1.2 Relative size of second-level domains in the .uk top-level domain over time 30 Figure 1.3 Number of within-SLD links per node in four .uk SLDs, 1996–2010 32 Figure 1.4 Links between four second-level domains 33 Figure 1.5 Network diagram of hyperlinks between universities 37 Figure 1.6 Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients between university league table rankings and ten different network centrality measures for three years 39 Figure 1.7 University in-strength rankings compared to university league table rankings for 2010 40 Figure 1.8 Left: Raw hyperlink strength (Sij) between universities versus geographical distance, and Right: Normalized hyperlink strength (σij) between universities versus geographical distance 41 Figure 1.9 Maps of the UK universities under study for three years: 2000, 2005 and 2010 43 Figure 2.1 Cumulative number of reviews in the live dataset 53 Figure 2.2 Cumulative number of attractions in the live dataset by first appearance 53 Figure 2.3 The number of new London attractions added each month to the TripAdvisor website based on archived data and live data 54 Figure 2.4 The proportion of attractions stored in the archived dataset increased irregularly to around 24% of all attractions on the TripAdvisor website from 2007 to 2013 even as the overall number of attractions on TripAdvisor continued to grow 54 ix Figure 2.5 Distribution of reviews per attraction in the live dataset and the archived data 55 Figure 2.6 Distribution of star ratings in live dataset and the archived data 56 Figure 2.7 Distribution of attraction rankings in the live dataset and the archived data 57 Figure 3.1 Extract from the .dk domain name list 68 Figure 3.2 Number of .dk domains over time 69 Figure 3.3 Registered and disappearing .dk domain names over time 69 Figure 3.4 Relationship in 2012 between ownership and domains (anonymous registrants removed) 71 Figure 3.5 Number of .dk domains over time 72 Figure 3.6 Number of domains in the .dk registry list and in Netarkivet 73 Figure 3.7 Number of .dk domains in the .dk registry, Netarkivet, and the Internet Archive 74 Figure 3.8 Domain names in the Internet Archive not found in the .dk registry 75 Figure 4.1 Connections between newspapers and other websites on the web in 1999 90 Figure 4.2 Connections between newspapers and other websites on the web in 2005 91 Figure 4.3 New Jersey local news ecosystem, 2008 97 Figure 4.4 New Jersey local news ecosystem, 2012 97 Figure 5.1 Evolution of outlinks to top five country domains over time 110 Figure 5.2 Correlation between outlinks and mentions of a country in BBC News Online 112 Figure 6.1 Cyberi Homepage.