The Past Web

This book provides practical information about web archives, offers inspiring examples for web archivists, raises new challenges, and shares recent research results about access methods to explore information from the past preserved by web archives. The book is structured in six parts. Part 1 advocates for the importance of web archives to preserve our collective memory in the digital era, demonstrates the problem of web ephemera and shows how web archiving activities have been trying to address this challenge. Part 2 then focuses on different strategies for selecting web content to be preserved and on the media types that different web archives host. It provides an overview of efforts to address the preservation of web content as well as smaller-scale but high-quality collections of social media or audiovisual content. Next, Part 3 presents examples of initiatives to improve access to archived web information and provides an overview of access mechanisms for web archives designed to be used by humans or automatically accessed by machines. Part 4 presents research use cases for web archives. It also discusses how to engage more researchers in exploiting web archives and provides inspiring research studies performed using the exploration of web archives. Subsequently, Part 5 demonstrates that web archives should become crucial infrastructures for modern connected societies. It makes the case for developing web archives as research infrastructures and presents several inspiring examples of added-value services built on web archives. Lastly, Part 6 reflects on the evolution of the web and the sustainability of web archiving activities. It debates the requirements and challenges for web archives if they are to assume the responsibility of being societal infrastructures that enable the preservation of memory. This book targets academics and advanced professionals in a broad range of research areas such as digital humanities, social sciences, history, media studies and information or computer science. It also aims to fill the need for a scholarly overview to support lecturers who would like to introduce web archiving into their courses by offering an initial reference for students.

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 programmes, and other pre-digital artefacts.This volume argues that now is the time to ask 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.

An original methodological framework for approaching the archived web, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right. As life continues to move online, the web becomes increasingly important as a source for understanding the past. But historians have yet to formulate a methodology for approaching the archived web as a source of study. How should the history of the present be written? In this book, Niels Brügger offers an original methodological framework for approaching the web of the past, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right. While many studies of the web focus solely on its use and users, Brügger approaches the archived web as a semiotic, textual system in order to offer the first book-length treatment of its scholarly use. While the various forms of the archived web can challenge researchers' interactions with it, they also present a range of possibilities for interpretation. The Archived Web identifies characteristics of the online web that are significant now for scholars, investigates how the online web became the archived web, and explores how the particular digitality of the archived web can affect a historian's research process. Brügger offers suggestions for how to translate traditional historiographic methods for the study of the archived web, focusing on provenance, creating an overview of the archived material, evaluating versions, and citing the material. The Archived Web lays the foundations for doing web history in the digital age, offering important and timely guidance for today's media scholars and tomorrow's historians.

The Internet has changed the past. Social media, Wikipedia, mobile networks, and the viral and visual nature of the Web have inundated the public sphere with historical information and misinformation, changing what we know about our history and History as a discipline. This is the first book to chronicle how and why it matters. Why does History matter at all? What role do history and the past play in our democracy? Our economy? Our understanding of ourselves? How do questions of history intersect with today’s most pressing debates about technology; the role of the media; journalism; tribalism; education; identity politics; the future of government, civilization, and the planet? At the start of a new decade, in the midst of growing political division around the world, this information is critical to an engaged citizenry. As we collectively grapple with the effects of technology and its capacity to destabilize our societies, scholars, educators and the general public should be aware of how the Web and social media shape what we know about ourselves - and crucially, about our past.

Tim Berners-Lee tells the story of how he came to create the World Wide Web, looks at the future development of the medium, and offers his opinions on censorship, privacy, and other issues.

"This is an important book that fills an important niche: a careful and comprehensive report to the field on the development and possibilities of online history."—Stephen Brier, Associate Provost and Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies, Graduate Center, CUNY

This is the first edited volume to put the emerging field of web history on the agenda of internet research. Sixteen original chapters investigate how the use of the web has developed in the realm of web culture at large, as well as how the organization of web industries and old media institutions on the web have changed. A number of fundamental theoretical and methodological questions related to doing web history are also examined. The collection aims to explore some of the possible ways of approaching the web of the past, based on the assumption that the past is not only important for historical purposes, but because it must be taken into consideration in order to fully understand the web of the present and the web of the future. The book includes a foreword by Charles Ess and contributions from Kirsten Foot, Steven Schneider, Alexander Halavais, Ken Hillis, and more.

The 13th International Conference on Human–Computer Interaction, HCI Inter- tional 2009, was held in San Diego, California, USA, July 19–24, 2009, jointly with the Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2009, the 8th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics, the 5th International Conference on Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction, the Third International Conf- ence on Virtual and Mixed Reality, the Third International Conference on Internati- alization, Design and Global Development, the Third International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing, the 5th International Conference on Augmented Cognition, the Second International Conference on Digital Human Mod- ing, and the First International Conference on Human Centered Design. A total of 4,348 individuals from academia, research institutes, industry and gove- mental agencies from 73 countries submitted contributions, and 1,397 papers that were judged to be of high scientific quality were included in the program. These papers - dress the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of the design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of human–computer interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas.