Niels Brügger

The Web and Digital Humanities: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns

Since the mid-1990s the Web has constituted an increasingly important source for studies of the recent history of society and culture, and a number of national and international Web archiving institutions have been established. This article discusses the different characteristics of Web materials and archived Web materials. It is argued that both of these characteristics differ from the concepts of digital materials developed within the frameworks of digital humanities and that the growing variety of different kinds of digital materials and processes calls for a reinterpretation of the computer, stressing the variability of the functional architecture of digital media.

Historical Network Analysis of the Web

This article discusses some of the fundamental methodological challenges related to doing historical network analyses of the web based on material in web archives. Since the late 1990s many countries have established extensive national web archives, and software supported network analysis of the online web has for a number of years gained currency within Internet studies. However, the combination of these two phenomena—historical network analysis of material in web archives—can at best be characterized as an emerging new area of study. Most of the methodological challenges within this new area revolve around the specific nature of archived web material. On the basis of an introduction to the processes involved in web archiving as well as of the characteristics of archived web material, the article outlines and scrutinizes some of the major challenges which may arise when doing network analysis in web archives, among others such issues as completeness, construction of a corpus, temporal and spatial inconsistencies, and cross-archive analyses. The article uses an ongoing case study to feed the methodological discussion, namely the political network on the web which was available to a voter at the Danish parliamentary elections in 2011, 2007, and 2001. As the Internet grows older historical studies of networks on the web will probably become more widespread and therefore it may be about time to begin debating the methodological challenges within this emerging field.

Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives:

I argue that web historiography should be placed higher on the Internet Studies’ research agenda, since a better understanding of the web of the past is an important condition for gaining a more complete understanding of the web of today, regardless of our focus (e.g. political economy, language and culture, social interaction or everyday use). Building on reflections about ’historiography’ and the ’web’, I discuss several major challenges of web historiography vis-à-vis historiography in general, focusing on the characteristics of the archived website and the web sphere, and the consequences of these characteristics for web historians. I conclude by outlining future directions for web historiography.

The Archived Website and Website Philology

Abstract Website history can be considered an emerging discipline at the intersection between media history and Internet history. In this discipline, the individual website is regarded as the unifying entity of the historical analysis rather than the Internet or the Web. Writing the history of a website involves using many sources and methods similar to those used in writing the history of any other media type. But one document type requires special attention: the archived website. This is so because the problems involved in finding, collecting and preserving the website are different from those characterizing the archiving of other types of traces of human activity, including other media types. The primary problem is that the actual act of finding, collecting and preserving changes the website that was on the live web in a number of ways, thus creating a unique version of it and not simply a copy. The present article sets out, first, to discuss to what extent the archived website can be considered a new type of historical document and how its characteristics affect the task of the website historian who must later use it; second, the article discusses and attempts to formulate some methodological principles, rules and recommendations for a future critical textual philology of the website.

The Web as 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 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 investigate historical patterns of culture and society, despite making good use of letters, novels, newspapers, radio and television programs, and other pre-digital artifacts. This volume argues that now is the time to question 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 web spaces and case studies of different government and media domains – as well as an introduction that provides an overview of this exciting new area of research.

Introduction: The Web’s first 25 years

In August 2016, we can celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Or can we? There is no doubt that the World Wide Web – or simply: the Web – has played an important role in the communicative infrastructure of most societies since the mid-1990s, but when did the Web actually start? And how has the Web developed from its beginning until today? The six articles in this Special Issue/section revolve around one of these questions in various ways.

Introduction: Internet histories

For more than four decades, the Internet has grown and spread to an extent where today it is an indispensable element in the communication and media environment of many countries, and indeed of everyday life, culture and society. These precipitous changes have called for the understanding of the innovations, actors, changes and continuities involved in these evolutions, from a technical, but also from a social, scientific, politic or economic point of view. Although the history of the Internet has not been yet very predominant within the academic literature, an increased number of books and journal articles within the last decade attest to the fact that Internet history is an emerging field of study across a number of scholarly disciplines and fields. This is most evident in Internet and new media studies, but also is clear in culture, media, communication and technology research, across the diverse settings and institutional locations where such work may be encountered. A central issue for the advancement of the field is that historical studies of the Internet have mostly been published in journals related to a variety of disciplines, and these journals only rarely publish articles with a clear historical focus. The situation has greatly improved with the various recent issues dedicated to Internet and web histories,

Book Review: Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds), Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. xiv 1 465 pp. ISBN 978—0—262—03353—4,

The edited volume Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse explores the nexus between cultural heritage organizations (especially museums) and emerging digital technologies.The contributors are mainly concerned with how digital technologies have transformed the traditional museum and, in turn, how the museum has appropriated, adapted, incorporated and transformed digital technologies.These questions are approached from both theoretical and practical points of view and the book is intended to serve a broad audience, from professionals and academics to non-specialists and practitioners. In addition, the volume is meant to be critical rather than simply descriptive, to put on the agenda ‘the meanings and the implications of the apparent transformations, challenges and possibilities posed by communications technologies’ (p. 3). Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage consists of an introduction and 22 chapters and is divided into three sections: replicants/object morphologies; knowledge systems and management: shifting paradigms and models; and cultural heritage and virtual systems.All of the chapters in the volume constitute substantial and relevant contributions to the study of the field. Thus, while the few chapters singled out below were chosen more or less at random, they represent the breadth of the themes covered. In ‘The Materiality of Virtual Technologies’,Andrea Witcomb questions the widespread assumption of a radical difference between the virtual and the material world, arguing that multimedia installations that act as installations or objects in their own right open a new affective space which enables the audience and the museum to interact in new non-didactic and open ways. In ‘Redefining Digital Art’, Beryl Graham formulates some working categories for classifying digital art, concluding that well-known categories such as collecting and archiving are fundamentally challenged by the fluid and dynamic character of digital art. ‘Digital Knowledgescapes,’ by Fiona Cameron and Helena Robinson, investigates how a museum’s documentation and interpretations of its collections can be reconceptualized to form new knowledge models, concluding with the argument that the new digital technologies may radically reform museum practices in general in the future. In ‘Engaged Dialogism in Virtual Space’, Despande, Geber and Timpson formulate a new theoretical framework (based on appraisal theory and New Media & Society 10(6)

40.00 (cloth)

I “Bogen som medie”, giver Niels Brugger et rids af bogens historiske transformationer. Litteraturens medie, bogen, er ikke blot en historisk konstant, der som en transparent ramme giver liv til litteraturen. Snarere viser bogens historiske udvikling og kunstneriske forsog med bogen som medie, at litteratur og medie ikke er adskilte faenomener.

Bogen som medie

In 1999 the Danish Research Council for the Humanities organized a seminar that was to take stock of the history and present state of Danish film and media studies. Here it clearly emerged that media studies in Denmark were not really constituted until the end of the sixties (cf. Bondebjerg 2000: 6). If one takes a closer look at what has been published on media research in Denmark since then, it becomes clear that the main emphasis has been partly laid on empirical results, often in the form of analyses of media products, of audiences or of political-economical-institutional aspects, and partly on introductions to and elaborations of international theories (cf. Mortensen 2000, and Bondebjerg 2000). This weighting has been well founded, namely insofar as media studies have had to legitimise and consolidate themselves as a new field of research. However, the consequence of this has been that reflections on media theory proper have been correspondingly toned down. Of course the analyses have been theoretically well-founded, and theoretical developments and discussions have taken place, but for one thing, the treatment of theories has tended to be what one could call intentional (with a few exceptions), i.e. directed towards something ‘outside’ the theories, namely instant analytical use and not (also) towards the theories ‘themselves’, and for another, the developments and discussions have often been set in motion by international theoretical conditions. Today, with media research a well-consolidated discipline, one could raise the question of whether more space and time should not be set aside for reflections on media theory proper. The project ”Theories of Media and Communication – Histories and Relevance” that was initiated on 1 January 2003, and is supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in 2003 constitutes an effort to create a future forum for discussing media theory.