Introduction: Internet histories and computational methods

Abstract

The internet is a born-digital medium, but for a number of years many histories of the internet have used traditional non-computational methods such as document analysis and interviews (e.g. Abbate, 2000; Banks, 2008; Goggin & McLelland, 2017; Poole, 2005; Turner, 2006). However, recent studies of Usenet and of the archived web have benefited from the born-digital nature of computer networks and have fruitfully used computational methods to explore the internet’s past (e.g. some of the chapters in Br€ ugger & Schroeder, 2017, in Br€ ugger 2017, and in Br€ ugger & Milligan, 2019), and monographs have been published where computational methods play a key role in the unlocking of the Web’s past (Milligan, 2019). Although the use of computational methods is not necessary just because the object of study itself is digital, with this special section of Internet Histories we present the possibilities and challenges related to the use of computational methods within historical studies of the internet and the web. The articles in this special section use varied computational methods to study the internet’s history in different ways, from quantitative and qualitative methods supported by computers to a variety of methods used to study the archived web. The special issue begins with “Internet Histories and Computational Methods: A ‘Round-Doc’ Discussion.” We invited a series of seven scholars to reflect on common questions around the themes of this special issue: why computational methods are important; what they need to look out for; how computational researchers need to understand their sources; as well as the history and future of these sorts of approaches. As it can be difficult to get all seven people together into one room, we decided to use “computational methods” to bring scholars together – collaboratively carrying out our conversation in a live-written document. Our first two formal pieces then explore Usenet and mailing lists. Avery DameGriff’s “Herding the ‘Performing Elements’: Using Computational Methods to Study Usenet, explores the challenges of exploring this medium. Dame-Griff explores the term “cisgender” in five transgender newsgroups, and discusses work on the innovative Transgender Usenet Archive. Several challenges lie at the heart of this work: technical ones (platforms and interfaces), the issue of contextualizing information, and of