Between marginal and mainstream. Communities and ecosystems at stake

The three research articles in this special issue and the interview with Ronda Hauben are partly the result of the 4 th RESAW conference, that brought together through the RESAW network 1 a community of researchers, web archivists and professionals, united around a common interest, namely web history and web archives. The 4 th RESAW conference, organised on 17 and 18 June 2021 by the C 2 DH (Centre for contemporary and digital history) at the University of Luxembourg, 2 sought to examine the tension between marginal and mainstream in web history, and to go beyond this binary view. The aim was to study all the nuances, shifts in meaning, difficulties in defining and measuring audiences, as well as the evolution over the course of history of digital practices, content, producers, and communities, from the fringes and peripheries to the centre and the core of the Web. The RESAW conference was also an opportunity to launch the HIVI research project 3 , hosted at the C 2 DH, and the topics that were addressed at the conference were also related to virality, as reflected, for example, in Gustavo Gomez-Mejia’s article on “buzz.” 4 Studying online virality and historicising the Web actually raise a number of methodological questions concerning the pro-ducing and user communities, movements between web spaces and socio-digital networks and the challenges of measuring and searchability. These topics could benefit from the issues raised by other web history researchers, such as the question of comments and moderation in the article by Jonathan Paßmann, Anne Helmond and Robert Jansma, that of scaling up and popularising software in the article by Derren Wison and his colleagues, or the question of the vocabulary to qualify phenomena linked to developing digital cultures, thanks to the study of Gustavo Gomez-Mejia on the word “buzz” and its shift from the marketing sphere to the general public sphere, notably via the press. The articles are the result of this meeting in 2021, but also discussions with Ronda Hauben on that occasion, setting out her account on the twenty-fifth