Jane Winters

Breaking in to the mainstream: demonstrating the value of internet (and web) histories

ABSTRACT This short article explores the challenges involved in demonstrating the value of web archives, and the histories that they embody, beyond media and Internet studies. Given the difficulties of working with such complex archival material, how can researchers in the humanities and social sciences more generally be persuaded to integrate Internet histories into their research? How can institutions and organisations be sufficiently convinced of the worth of their own online histories to take steps to preserve them? And how can value be demonstrated to the wider general public? It touches on public attitudes to personal and institutional Internet histories, barriers to access to web archives – technical, legal and methodological - and the cultural factors within academia that have hindered the penetration of new ways of working with new kinds of primary source. Rather than providing answers, this article is intended to provoke discussion and dialogue between the communities for whom Internet histories can and should be of significance.

What does an author want from a university publisher?: Authors and university publishers

Key points Automated responsiveness is efficient and reassuring, but personalized responsiveness makes an author feel valued. On a very practical level, authors value timely peer review, perhaps above anything else. The perceived drop in copyediting and production quality is a common author gripe. Publishers need to be open about open access – many authors are not as knowledgeable as assumed.

Web 25: histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web, edited by N. Brügger: New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2017, 258 pp., US

This self-evidently timely publication, prompted by the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web in 2014, is an important contribution to the growing field of web and Internet history. It is one of the first serious scholarly attempts to consider the factors – social, cultural, technical and economic – which have shaped the web as we know it today; and to examine how the web in turn has shaped contemporary society and our daily lived experience. The book is divided into four sections: the early web; the web of culture and media; methodological reflections; and web archives as historical source. As these headings reveal, the histories of the web are approached here from a variety of different disciplinary standpoints, using different methodologies, and shaped by different sectoral interests. Archivists and librarians, scholars in media and communication studies, journalists, information scientists and historians are all present, reflecting the interand multi-disciplinary nature of web studies. Similarly, most chapters take an admirably multi-source approach, studying the web in its wider, often analogue, context. The first section on the early web begins with Niels Br€ uggers discussion of the hyperlink, which he rightly identifies as “a defining feature of the web”. He places it in a long tradition of human attempts to navigate between and link related data, establishing that while much about the web might be novel it is far from introducing a complete break with the past. Next, Simone Natale and Paolo Bory discuss the narratives and myths that have come to shape understandings of the webs history. They highlight the many contrasting, even divergent, stories that have taken hold of the popular imagination, from “the recurring narrative pattern of the hero” (p. 33) to “arguments about the webs decentralized and egalitarian character” (p. 35). Their choice of the plural “biographies” is deliberate. Jean Marie Dekens chapter provides a detailed case-study of the development and influence of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centers website between 1991 and 1993. It perhaps tends towards the “hero” narrative identified by Natale and Bory but is nonetheless an interesting and forensic reconstruction of events. The section concludes with Marguerite Barrys fascinating study of the language used to describe the web in its formative years, discussing evolving, and sometimes opposed, concepts such as birth and parenthood; domesticity and ferality; availability and accessibility; the commercial and the utopian. The importance of storytelling again emerges strongly. The next three chapters deal with online culture and media, ranging from changing publishing and reading behaviours in China, to the development of blogs in Italy and the impact of the web on an Australian newspaper. The international scope of the section is significant, reinforcing the argument that the impact of the web has not been experienced in the same way across nations and cultures. Michel Hockxs account of the extraordinary explosion of online literary reading in China made possible by the web is one of the strongest chapters in the collection. It reminds us that the Wests concentration on the “great firewall” prevents us from fully acknowledging the vibrancy of Chinese web culture: ‘‘Not only does the world inside the great firewall get by without the core websites associated with the ‘free’ world, but it even exports websites and applications that are preferred by Chinese users outside China over the ‘free world’ INTERNET HISTORIES 2018, VOL. 2, NOS. 3-4, 351–353

94.95 (hardcover), ISBN: 9781433132704, US

This article discusses the evolution of British History Online, with particular attention to the ways in which this digital library has tried to achieve a financially self-sustaining status.