Niels Brügger

Since the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web (or simply: the web) has played an increasingly important role in many societies, and it constitutes one of the main pillars in today’s communicative infrastructures. Due to the fragility of born-digital media, the online web is disappearing at an unprecedented pace. Fortunately, since the mid-1990s, web archives have been established and have preserved a treasure trove of more than 25 years of digital sources. Nevertheless, the valuable digital sources collected by institutions, from the US-based Internet Archive to many national web archives, remain untapped resources that have not yet impacted research within the humanities and the social sciences to the degree that one would have expected. In addition, most of the emerging literature related to the research use of web archives focuses on national settings, whereas genuinely transnational studies are lacking. This book, The Routledge Handbook of Transnational Web Archive Studies, aims to draw attention to the many archived web collections and rethink the challenges and possibilities they constitute for transnational studies of past and present web communication.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies explores the untapped potential of web archives for researching transnational digital history and communication. It covers cross- border, cross- collection, and cross- institutional examination of web archives on a global scale. This comprehensive collaborative work, emerging from the WARCnet research network, presents an exploration of the ways web archive research can transcend technological and legal challenges to allow for new comparative, transnational studies of the web’s pasts, and of global events. By combining interdisciplinary work and fostering collaboration between web archivists and researchers, the book provides readers with cutting- edge approaches to analyzing digital cultural heritage across countries. The book contains concrete examples on how to research national web domains through a transnational perspective; provides case studies with grounded explorations of the COVID- 19 crisis as a distinctly transnational event captured by web archives; offers methodological considerations while unpacking techniques and skill sets for conducting transnational web archive research; and critically engages the politics and power dynamics inherent to web archives as institutionalised collections. The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies is an essential read for graduate students and scholars from internet and media studies, cultural studies, history, and digital humanities. It will also appeal to web archiving practitioners, including librarians, web curators, and IT developers.

This chapter discusses the use of national web archives in transnational studies by investigating as to what extent it is possible to make a comparative study of several countries’ national web domains, based on the holdings in different national European web archives. The chapter is guided by the following research questions: What does the web archive landscape look like for a researcher who wants to make a transnational study of different nations’ web domains across different web archives? — and how do the differences and similarities of the web collections affect how the researcher can navigate this landscape? An already existing historical study of a national web domain — the Danish web — is used with a view to providing a standard of comparison. The research questions are investigated based on interviews with staff from the following national web archives: Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, the Royal Library of the Netherlands, and the British Library.

This chapter demonstrates how the use of a national web archive in hyperlinked network analyses may prove an indispensable source when conducting not only historical but also contemporary analyses of a given website. Our analyses are based on the case of videnskab.dk, a Danish journalistic website disseminating research-related knowledge to the public. Focus is on the examination of hyperlinks related to videnskab.dk in the years of 2009, 2014, 2018, and 2022, followed by a network analysis of videnskab.dk in relation to similar transnational websites. Our results showcase what insights may be gained when conducting analyses with and without access to a national web archive, respectively, highlighting the impact and importance of data collections when studying the online web.

This article investigates the vast field of conspiracy theories by focusing on the example of conspiracy theories related to vaccine hesitancy. Conspiracy theories have been with us for a long time, and as any other type of semantic content they spread by travelling through media. Therefore, if one wants to understand how conspiracy theories proliferate, it is relevant to investigate the media roads by which they travel and that each offer different opportunities for establishing connections. It is obvious that within the last three decades the advent of digital media has opened up new road systems to support conspiracy theories’ getting around. This article focuses on one such road system, the World Wide Web, and how the hyperlink networks on the Danish web related to conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy have developed from 2006 to 2015. The article aims at (1) contributing to the development of methods that enables such a study, and (2) providing results about how these hyperlink networks have developed. The network analysis reveals that the potential exchange of ideas about vaccination between experts and non-experts is not facilitated by the media material structures in either of the years, since almost no links exist between the two actor types, at least not on the physical performative level of hyperlinks. Experts are connected, but non-experts as a whole tend to function as an archipelago of isolated islands—isolated from the experts, and by and large isolated from each other. This tendency has remained almost the same throughout the investigated period. News media that one could expect to function as brokers connecting experts and non-experts are not particularly well-connected in the network and apparently do not mediate between actor types.

This article uses Internet archives to explore the emergence and spread of the term ‘mHealth’ (mobile health technologies) in the Danish Web domain from 2006 to 2018, focusing on the actors that contributed to its evolution. We propose three methods for investigating the Web pages and Web sites that employed the term ‘mHealth’. Our findings highlight temporal developments in the use of ‘mHealth’, with diverse actors using it, though none clearly dominated. The article attends to challenges in working with Web archive data, and presents methods that can be used by others wishing to engage empirically with Internet archives, which remain vast, but largely under-exploited resources.

(2020). Internet histories early career researcher award. Internet Histories. Ahead of Print.