Iscc web historiography

THE CENTRE FOR INTERNET
STUDIES
Niels Brügger, Director, the Centre for Internet Studies & co-director
NetLab
Web historiography, An emerging field within internet studies , 25 june
1
Web historiography
An emerging field within internet
studies

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NetLab
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paris.fr — 2013
paris.fr — 2003,
Internet Archive
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paris.fr — 2008,
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Lessons to be learned?
The importance of the web is growing
More and more of our societal, cultural, political, etc.
communication take place on the web
The web of the past disappears
40% changed, 40% removed, 20% still there after one year
If we want to document the present or study
the past on the web we have to archive it
‘We’ can be a scholar/group of scholars or a (trans)national
web archive such as the Internet Archive or BnF/INA
Web archiving matters for anyone who wants to use the
web as a source in any kind of study

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Agenda
1. Web historiography
 Why study the history of the web?
 Web and web strata
 Historiography and the web
2. The history of one website: www.dr.dk, 1996-2006
3. Web archiving
 Digitized, Born-digital, and Reborn-digital Materials
 A short history of web archives
 The case of the Danish Netarkivet
4. The challenges of the archived web
 The characteristics of the archived web
 Analytical and methodological consequences
5. A register of websites: An old practice with new implications

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1. Web historiography — Why study the history of the web?
During the first decades of internet studies
historiography did not play a significant role
when establishing a new field, studying the
past is less urgent than studying the present
the very short past of the web may not
even be considered a history
Web history today:
a few web histories have been written
not yet constituted as a field of study in its
own right (lack of a set of shared theoretical
and methodological assumptions or
discussions)
a growing interest in the field

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Web strata:
 web element
 web page
 web site
 web sphere
 web
Web element
1. Web historiography — Web and web strata

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Web page

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Website
Web page
Web
element
Web site

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Website
Web page
Web
element
Web sphere
Web sphere

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The web
Web

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The web
Website
Web page
Web
element
Web sphere

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Fundamental questions of historiography:
1.The purpose of the study
2.The philosophy and theory of history
3.Methodological issues concerning the source material
1. Web historiography — Historiography and the web?

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Specific challenges for web historiography
1. The purpose of the study
2. The philosophy and theory of history
3. Methodological issues concerning the source material
One of the main source types stands apart, namely
archived web material.

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The web as a tool:
Web History
Digital History
 web historiography
 the web as source
 to improve historical research
 to present and communicate the historian’s work

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Website
Web page
Web
element

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Overall aim
to write a monograph about the development of dr.dk from 1996 to
2006
 started july 2007
 supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in
2007-10
 The development of the project website is supported by the
'Knowledge Society' research priory area of the Faculty of
Humanities, Aarhus University

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What are the driving forces behind the
creation and development of www.dr.dk
from 1996 to 2006, and what are the
consequences of these for the website?
What theoretical and
methodological new developments
are required in order to be able to
analyze www.dr.dk?
Status:
1) collected a great number of sources (problems with access, time consuming)
2) theoretical/methodological discussions (papers, articles, book chapters)
3) read all relevant press releases 1990-2006 — first framework
4) reading all sources
5) writing about the period 1990 to August1996

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Source material
Many sources — minutes of meetings, strategy papers,
correspondance, etc.
And the archived website, in two ways:
 the object of my history of dr.dk (textual structure, layout, etc.)
 a source that tells us something about the history of dr.dk
(information about the site, the organisation DR, etc.)

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Digitized
Previously analog material which has been digitized.
Born-digital
Has never existed in any other form than digital.
Reborn-digital
Born-digital material which has been collected and preserved, and
which to some degree has been changed in this process.
3. Web archiving — Digitized, Born-digital, and Reborn-digital

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The short history of web archives — 12-14 years — three main phases
The pre-history of web archives
 begin of the 90ies and onwards
 individuals, families, organizations, institutions...
 html, screendumps
 no considerations about archiving
 no considerations about cultural heritage
Static web publications in national libraries
 app. same period
 national libraries
 static web documents, look like journals and books
 overall approach that of print culture (catalogueing...)
 more professional
 legal deposit laws
The dynamic web in (trans)national web archives
 a little later
 crawlers, spin-off of search engine technology
 the number of archiving initiatives increases
 dynamic web material
 librarian approach challenged
 other transnational stakeholders
Examples
 The Internet Archive, 1996 — snapshot, transnational
 Kulturarw3, Sweden, 1996/97 — snapshot, national
 Pandora, Australia, 1996 — selective, national
 Netarkivet, Denmark, 2005 — three strategies, nation.
 BnF/INA, 2006
3. Web archiving — A short history of web archives

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Three general strategies:
a) snapshot
b) selective
c) event
From Bjarne Andersen: ”DK-domænet i ord og tal”, netarkivet.dk
Coverage
Time
Snapshot
Selective
Event
3. Web archiving — The case of the Danish Netarkivet

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4. The Challenges — The Characteristics of the Archived Web
 Different archiving purpose and strategy
 Differences as to technological choices
Web archiving
Macro web archiving
•archiving institutions, such as national libraries
•aiming at preserving the cultural heritage of, for
instance, a nation state
•allows for as many different kinds of research
projects as possible in the future
Micro web archiving
•individual scholars or groups
•in relation to, for instance, a specific research
project
•usually calibrated to fit the research project in
question

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The online web is changed or deleted with an
unprecedented pace
Must be collected and archived here and now, while it
is still online
The web archive is a real-time archive

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The archiving institution that wants to archive the
online web must make a number of choices
What is archived is almost never a copy on a 1:1
scale of what was once online
A collection of unique versions which did not exist
before the act of archiving
It is created in and by the process of archiving, which
is why it can be considered 'reborn' digital material
The archived web is a reborn, unique and deficient
version and not simply a copy of what was once online

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No matter how an archived web document has been created, and
no matter in what archive it is found, the web historian cannot
expect it to be an identical copy on a 1:1 scale of what was actually
on the live web at a given time
From born digital to 're-born digital'
Two reasons for this
• the archived web document is an actively created and subjective
re-construction
• it is almost always deficient

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An actively created and subjective re-construction
• subjective because choices have to be made between different
archiving forms and strategies (made by either an individual or an
institution)
• a re-construction in the sense that it is re-created on the basis of
a variety of archived web elements that are re-assembled and re-
combined in the archive
Thus, the archived web document is the result of an active process
and in this sense it does not exist prior to the act of archiving.

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Almost always deficient — for two reasons
• technical reasons (soft- or hardware), for instance words, images,
graphics, sounds, moving images can be missing, or some of the
possibilities of interaction can be non-functional in the archived
web document
• the dynamics of updating, that is the fact that the web content
might have changed during the process of archiving, and we do
not know if, where, and when this happens — an example

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”During the Olympics in Sydney in 2000, I wanted to save the
website of the Danish newspaper JyllandsPosten. I began at the
first level, the front page, on which I could read that the Danish
badminton player Camilla Martin would play in the finals a half hour
later.
My computer took about an hour to save this first level, after which
time I wanted to download the second level, ’Olympics 2000’. But on
the front page of this section, I could already read the result of the
badminton finals (she lost).
The website was — as a whole — not the same as when I had
started; it had changed in the time it took to archive it, and I could
now read the result on the front page, where the match was
previously only announced.”
N. Brügger: Archiving Websites, 2005, pp. 22-23

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Consequences
• we cannot be sure that we have everything in our archive — we
will always have lost something in the asynchronous relationship
between updating and archiving
• we are also in danger of getting something that in a way was
never there — something that is different from what was really
there

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My archived version of the newspaper’s website can be a
combination of elements from two (or more) versions that were
there at different times — but they were never there at the same
time as they might now be in my archive.
Paradox:
• the archive is not exactly as the website really was in the past (we
have lost something)
• but the archive may be exactly as the Internet never was in the
past (we get something different).

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The process of archiving
• creates a unique version and not a copy
• a version of an original which we can never expect to find in the
form it actually took on the web
• neither can we find an original among the different versions, nor
can we reconstruct an original based on the different versions

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Since a web archive usually covers more than one
point in past time, numerous versions of the same web
element will exist — a URL, a web page, an image, a
website, a hyperlink etc. — each from a different point
in time
Most often websites (especially larger websites) are
not continuously archived in their totality — the spatial
extension of the same archived website is not
necessarily identical throughout time
The broad web archive is multitemporal and multispatial

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The rapid and endless new developments of software
and use forms on the web force the archiving
institutions to try to keep pace with these changes
The web archive is often reactive in the sense that it
is constantly struggling to keep up with the changes
The web archive tends to be reactive

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The web material is incomplete compared to what
was once online — two general types of
incompleteness
 The user of a web archive will miss some of the
information about the web which is usually at
hand on the online web
 Individual web elements and possibilities of
interaction may be missing
Something is missing

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What is specific for the incompleteness of web
archives is not that things are missing, but rather that
they may be missing in ways which make it very
difficult to determine if something is missing at all as
well as what and where
No stable original to compare with
Incompleteness is rarely documented
Something is missing

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4. The Challenges — Analytical and Methodological Consequences
The complex blend of hypertextuality, interactivity,
multimediality, and fluctuation (born-digital material)
increases when combined in the web archive with
material from other points in past time
Each synchronic and historically distinct form of
heterogeneity and complexity is multiplied,
accumulated, and combined diachronically
The further the archive stretches back into the past,
the more heterogeneous and complex the archived
material becomes
Heterogeneity and complexity is multiplied

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The structure of hyperlinks is an integrated part of the
archived web and not just an added feature of the
archive
Gives rise to problems of inconsistency related to
time and space
 Temporal inconsistency between the link source
and the link target
 Spatial inconsistency if the link target is not
archived at all
Difficult to determine if — and to what extent — the
archived web material is inconsistent or not
Hyperlinks become inconsistent

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When studying the online web one can select a
corpus to study, for instance, a set of URLs or file
types
In a web archive: since a number of versions of each
element exist, one has to construct not only one
corpus, but two.
First the URLs that should be included in the study
Second the specific versions of each of these URLs
An archived web corpus is a double construction

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The archived content itself as well as the division of the
material in elements can be changed
Any 'montage' of the archived elements in the archive —
or any extraction from the archive — is also an editing of
these elements
Reason: the subdivision of the archived material and the
subsequent combination of elements are not necessarily
inscribed in the material itself
A continuum with no clear-cut temporal or spatial
subdivisions inscribed by the producer; the subdivisions
are editable, scalable, and random, and they are made a
posteriori by either the web archive or the scholar
The archived web is edited and editable

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The amount and the complexity of the archived
material do not allow for systematic and detailed
processing of the entire archive once the web has
been archived (exceptions exist)
Have to make do with either the metadata provided
by the archived web itself (e.g. meta-tags in the source
code), or with the log files from the archiving process,
if the archive makes them available
Subsequent processing is lacking

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If transnational studies are to be based on archived
web material, all the analytical and methodological
consequences outlined above are multiplied by the
number of involved web archives
The interoperability between web archives is challenged

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How can one of the basic practices of media and web
historiography — the creation of a register of websites — shed
new light on the use of the web as a historical source?

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A register of sub-sites on dr.dk
Sub-site: dr.dk/nyheder, dr.dk/radio, etc.
The register includes 480 sub-sites and can be seen at:
www.drdk.dk/registrant.html

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A register
tailored to the research question(s) it makes it possible to
answer
media characteristics of the medium it registers
makes use of a number of categories: Title, date of
publication or transmission, writer, director, cast, etc.

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Main concern — web material
The media characteristics of the web medium forces us to
reconsider and possibly reinterpret the categories:
What should be understood by 'Title', 'Date of publication or
transmission', etc.?
Main concern — traditional media
Which categories to include with a view to uniting research question
and media characteristics?

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Print media, film and radio/television
The title of a newspaper and the titles of the articles in it are supplied
by the publisher and they are unequivocal
And the same goes for film, radio and television
Title
Websites
Three possible titles:
 the name as it appears from the sub-site’s textual content
 the URL of the sub-site as it appears in the location line in the
browser window
 the page title which the publisher may have given the web page,
and which can be read at the top of the browser window

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Yet another problem — redirects
A URL may not correspond to an actual website, but can be merely an
'empty' name
Consequences
A sub-site can have more names than the ones on the webpage — a
number of possible 'satellite names'
It is difficult to find these 'satellite names', and we cannot see them
on the website
It is difficult to determine, whether a URL corresponds to a website or
redirects to another URL, and is thus is ’empty’

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... and this issue becomes further complicated in connection with
historical studies...
Redirects are not always identical over a period of time, they come and go
and their role may change, a former main URL may become a redirecting
URL — and the other way around
Concluding on the category ‘Title’
In a register of a historical source such as a Website, one of the most
fundamental categories ’the title’ is in many ways more equivocal and
fluid than it is in other media types
And in general it is very difficult to reconstruct and document this network
of names in the past.

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Can normally be identified without difficulty due to the material or
semiotic characteristics of the medium (or combinations of these):
printed newspapers or film: the material delimitation of each copy
radio or television programs: semiotic demarcation of programs in
the flow by means of transitional markers such as jingles, voice-
overs, titles and credit lines
newspaper articles: material delimitation — the individual
newspaper copy — and semiotic delimitations within each copy
(headings, layout of text, pagination...)
Spatial extent
Websites
Seems in some respects closer to broadcast media, as the outer
limits are established almost solely by semiotic means

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Challenge
Does not unfold as a linking of semantic elements in a time-based
progressive chain of expression
How to get an overview of the entire spatial extent of the website?
And how to do this over time, in historical studies?
”a coherent textual unit that unfolds in one or more interrelated
browser windows, the coherence of which is based on semantic,
formal and physically performative interrelations.”
N. Brügger: ”Website history and the website as an object of study”, New Media & Society, 11/1-2, 2009, p. 122.

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Concluding on the category ‘Spatial extent’
The Website is not delimited in a material way (as are print media) or
by the linking of semantic elements in a progressive chain of
expression (as are broadcast media)
We are dependent:
on such aspects as semantic cohesion, paratexts and linking when
delimiting the spatial extent of the subsite
and on the consistency of these means of expression over time when
trying to trace the same subsite in the past

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Websites
May have something similar to a ‘start time’
But not based on a 'narration' with a beginning, a story and an end.
More complex — a ‘continuum of publication’
Temporal extent
The temporal extent is based on the rhythm of chronology:
print media have a clearly marked and precise time of publication
(month, week, date and hour)
programs in broadcast media have a precise start time, followed by
a transmission time and a precise stop time, all of which are marked
in the aired program and possibly also in a program schedule

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Start time?
First time published on a webserver.
But can be difficult to establish with certainty:
almost never mentioned on the website in the same way as in a newspaper or a broadcast
program
secondary sources such as program schedules does not exist
press releases can help, but not always possible to determine whether the website was
actually launched on the announced date
... and, unfortunately, web archives are not of much help...
The existence of a subsite in a web archive: it existed at the time of archiving
Conclusion
In most cases the start time will be imprecise
— a period of time rather than a point in time

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Temporal extent of the subsite from the 'start point' and onwards?
If a start time can be established, the temporal extent of the subsite
from this point onwards is fundamentally different from that which we
know from other media types:
a continuous publication with no overarching marked temporal
subdivisions, such as dates or hours/minutes
the temporal subdivisions are not made by the producer at the time of
publication or transmission, but by the archive or the researcher 'post
festum’
temporal subdivisions are therefore random in relation to the time
continuum of the media artifact — and they can therefore be changed
after publication
temporal subdivisions are not necessarily identical in different
archives — most often they are not — and they can be different in the
same archive

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Stop time?
Although the Website has a temporal extent like a radio or television
program, it does not need to have a stop time in order to be a website
as does radio and television programs.
The stop time of a website may be defined in two different ways.
the website has been removed from the web server
the website is not being updated anymore, but remains on the web
server

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In both cases we face a number of practical problems in determining
what has actually happened....
We may only be able to register the fact that at a certain point in
time, it was no longer online.
It is difficult to determine whether the website is actually being
updated or not
Consequence
It is very difficult to determine when a website ‘ends’.
If our register has to show how meny websites existed at a given time
the number of active websites tends to grow — an accumulation
of ‘non-ended’ websites

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Concluding on the category ‘Temporal extent’
Compared to the programs of broadcast media:
the web sub-site as a whole is often continuous
the well-known entities of start and stop times may in themselves
form more of a continuum than a point in time
the website may thus appear to be a historical source that is not only
continuous, but infinite

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Various archived versions
Regardless of who stores a newspaper or a film strip, or who presses
the record button, archived copies of newspapers, films and radio
and television programs are by and large identical.
Minor differences may, for instance, include the absence or presence
of commercials in archived television programs.
Websites
A unique version and not a copy.
The differences between archived sub-sites are more or less
fundamental to their presence in an archive.
Standardization and documentation is difficult.

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Concluding on the category ‘Various archived versions’
The differences between versions may very well affect the above-
mentioned categories – names, spatial and temporal extents —
insofar as they may vary, depending on which archived version is
used.
The differences between archived versions play a crucial role when
establishing a register of subsites, which is why it is relevant to
register the known archived versions as well as their limitations and
deficiencies.

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A register of websites?
A register of subsites is in many ways significantly different from
registers of other types of media such as newspapers, films, radio and
television, whether in their analog or digital form.
The question is no longer simply whether we wish to include the 'title'
and 'publication date' in our register, but also how we wish to interpret
the terms 'title' and 'publication date'.

STUDIES
NetLab
64
Websites
The apparently simple and practical task of creating a register of
these historical sources forces us to reconsider well-known
categories in a number of ways, and to supplement the usual
assumptions regarding which categories to include with more
fundamental reflections on what we actually understand by each of
these.
... are easy ;-)

STUDIES
NetLab
65
Comments?
Discussion?

Iscc web historiography

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