Assessing the loss of Western Canadian digital heritage

In 2003, UNESCO recognized the volatility of our heritage on the web. In response, many Canadian institutions rose to the challenge to preserve our digital heritage. This study examines web archives created by the University of Alberta Libraries relevant to Western Canadian heritage. We examine these collections in order to (1) assess their degree of link rot (which occurs when a website is no longer online) and (2) to determine how extensively these websites have been preserved.

Recovering contemporary genre histories – the development of chick lit as seen through the internet archive’s wayback machine and wikipedia’s history page

In the perception of literary scholars, the investigation of genre histories is still closely linked to ‘offline’ archival work. However, the Internet has been publicly accessible since 1991, and over the last thirty years, numerous new literary genres have emerged. They have often been proclaimed, defined, spread, marketed, criticized, and even pronounced dead online. By now, a great deal of this digital material is said to have disappeared. What many scholars do not consider, however, is that parts of the web are archived, for example by the Internet Archive and Wikipedia, which make their archives publicly available via the Wayback Machine and the history page respectively. This makes it possible to track early online definitions of contemporary genres and their development. In this paper, I will use the chick lit genre, which emerged in the second half of the 1990s, as a case study to show the benefits of including web archives in the reconstruction of contemporary genre histories. An analysis of both the first extensive and long-running fan websites, which are now offline but well-documented in the Internet Archive, and the history page of the Wikipedia article on chick lit will challenge some of the narratives that have long dominated chick lit research.

‘Go fish’: Conceptualising the challenges of engaging national web archives for digital research

Our work considers the sociotechnical and organisational constraints of web archiving in order to understand how these factors and contingencies influence research engagement with national web collections. In this article, we compare and contrast our experiences of undertaking web archival research at two national web archives: the UK Web Archive located at the British Library and the Netarchive at the Royal Danish Library. Based on personal interactions with the collections, interviews with library staff and observations of web archiving activities, we invoke three conceptual devices (orientating, auditing and constructing) to describe common research practices and associated challenges in the context of each national web archive. Through this framework we centre the early stages of the research process that are often only given cursory attention in methodological descriptions of web archival research, to discuss the epistemological entanglements of researcher practices, instruments, tools and methods that create the conditions of possibility for new knowledge and scholarship in this space. In this analysis, we highlight the significant time and energy required on the part of researchers to begin using national web archives, as well as the value of engaging with the curatorial infrastructure that enables web archiving in practice. Focusing an analysis on these research infrastructures facilitates a discussion of how these web archival interfaces both enable and foreclose on particular forms of researcher engagement with the past Web and in turn contributes to critical ongoing debates surrounding the opportunities and constraints of digital sources, methodologies and claims within the Digital Humanities.