Web Archives and (Digital) History: A Troubled Past and a Promising Future?

Abstract

‘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’ (Brügger, Goggin, Milligan and Schafer, 2017: 1). So begins the introduction to the journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society, launched in 2017. The World Wide Web, which unlocked the full potential of the Internet, has been with us for nearly 30 years; and in October 2016 the Internet Archive celebrated 20 years of capturing, preserving and republishing the Web (Hanamura, 2016). These are pleasingly round figures, indicating the passage of substantial time and the relative maturity both of the Web itself and the processes that have evolved to ensure that it is archived for the benefit of researchers. But those same researchers, and historians in particular, remain largely oblivious to the richness of the archived Web as a primary source for the study of the recent past, if not oblivious to the very existence of Web archives. This chapter will examine the reasons for historians’ relative failure to engage with the archived Web, and suggest why it is critical for contemporary, political and digital historians at least to do so. It will go on to explore the changing relationship between archivists, librarians and historians, which is beginning to break down researchers’ reluctance to work with born-digital materials and big data. Finally, it will propose an exciting future for (digital) historical research, which employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to recover the lives and voices of ordinary people.