Tracing the online development of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces through the UK web archive

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the method and results of research using web archives to explore the development of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Armed Forces websites. The methodology shows how an initial corpus was created and analysed to establish the purpose of the MoD and Armed Forces websites. Visual hierarchy design, thematic content analysis, and an understanding of website design were used to contextualise online content. Recruitment content is shown to have been a chief concern of the Armed Forces websites throughout the period, particularly for the British Army. Changes in recruitment terminology and the increased employment of interactive content are examined. It is argued that the greater use of content such as videos was not the result of a change in approach towards recruitment but an adoption of the increased capabilities of websites. The importance of the MoD and Armed Forces websites as a means of influencing public opinion is established and the Army's development of its website as a communication channel is explored. Link analysis was used to investigate the central position of the MoD campaign Supporting Britain's Reservists and their Employers in the visualisation of the .mod.uk domain and the Territorial Army's attempts to recruit personnel for the Army Medical Service.

KEYWORDS:

• Web archives
• digital history
• online development

Acknowledgments

This study would not have been possible without the initial funding and support provided by the Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project. I would also like to extend my thanks to the organisers of the 2017 Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials where a version of this paper was first presented. I am grateful to the journal's peer reviewers whose feedback was of great help. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Jane Winters for the advice she offered at several stages of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The history of how particular iterations of UK domain websites came to be archived, particularly at the outset of this period, is convoluted. Early iterations were archived by the Internet Archive, and made accessible through the Wayback Machine hosted in San Francisco, and acquired for the UKWA by Jisc (Cowls, 2017, p. 220; Hale, Blank, & Alexander, 2017, pp. 51–52; Schroeder & Brügger, 2017, pp. 6–9). Research on this topic has, however, been conducted through the UKWA and relevant sources were found and identified through the UKWA in the first instance. The UK Government Web Archive, available through The National Archives, has also been used during the course of this research and relevant sources can be distinguished in the bibliography.

Additional information

Funding

Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of its Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities theme [grant reference AH/L009854/1].

Notes on contributors

Harry Raffal

Harry Raffal is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hull having studied the role of the RAF and Luftwaffe during Operation DYNAMO, the evacuation of the Dunkirk in 1940. He began researching the online development of the Ministry of Defence and British Armed Forces after receiving a bursary from the Institute for Historical Research as part of the 2014 “Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities” project. He has received research bursaries from the Royal Historical Society, the Sir Richard Stapley Trust and the Royal Air Force Museum.