Editorial

In September 2012, two academics at Aarhus University in Denmark, Niels Brügger and Niels Ole Finnemann, convened the first meeting of a new research network, A Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials (RESAW). Their aim was to promote the use and value of web archives for academic research; to bring together key stakeholders with an interest in the field, from librarians and archivists to historians and researchers in media and communication studies; and to plan, and ultimately deliver, effective infrastructural support for scholars interested in working with the archived web. The network was explicitly European, but from the outset it was more global in focus than this would suggest, with members also drawn from Australia, Canada, Taiwan and the US. Around 50 people from a range of different countries, sectors and institutions attended the inaugural gathering in Denmark to discuss future collaborative activities (RESAW, n.d.).

RESAW was a timely and welcome initiative. In 2012, the web had been with us for 23 years, and web archiving in one form or another for 16 (Brügger, 2017, p. xi; Winters, 2016, p. 239). This was long enough for both the live and archived web to have become objects of academic attention, but those interested in the latter were generally working on their own, without access to an obvious community of peers. RESAW provided the mechanisms to address this isolation, and as it matured so too did the study of web archives. A key point in the development of the network was the first major RESAW conference, held in Aarhus in June 2015. Delegates explored “Web archives as scholarly sources: issues, practices and perspectives”, and took the opportunity to plan new projects and publications (RESAW, n.d.). Two years later, momentum was such that it was possible to organise an entire week of events in London celebrating the most innovative research and practice concerned with web archives and web histories.

Web Archiving Week included an “Archives Unleashed” hackathon and a public debate on “Web archives: truth, lies and politics in the 21st century”, both held at the British Library, but the centrepiece of the programme was a major international conference at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, organised under the auspices of RESAW and the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) (Web Archiving Week, n.d.). Over the course of three days, more than 150 delegates from around the world heard presentations concerned with everything from the most recent technical innovations in web archiving to the latest ground-breaking research in the humanities and social sciences using web archives as a primary source (School of Advanced Study, 2017). Central to the ethos of the conference, and to RESAW more generally, were the conversations that took place between disciplines and across sectors: librarians and archivists talked to historians and media specialists; computer scientists and academic technicians met with scholars in modern languages and the history of medicine.

The three articles in this special issue of Internet Histories reflect this energy and diversity, both in the backgrounds of the authors themselves and in their choices of subject and method. Harry Raffal's contribution considers the ways in which the UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Armed Forces deployed the web to try to increase recruitment over a period of roughly 20 years. Raffal's approach is that of a historian, and his interest lies principally in changes over time. This kind of study would simply not be possible without web archives, where the temporal aspects of the web may be preserved at least in part. Researchers would instead be limited to reading about the MOD and Forces’ websites in brief printed minutes and reports (sources which, conversely, Raffal is able to use to enrich his interactions with the born-digital record), to inferring the existence of an earlier digital source which no longer exists. One particularly striking aspect of Raffal's research is his attention to the history of web design and the materiality of the web (for example, the devices on which we choose to view websites). This is a fertile and currently rather underexplored aspect of web history, distinct from straightforward studies of the technologies underpinning the web. Raffal's work illustrates how a historian might approach web archives, and integrate them into “mainstream” historical research. It employs network analysis and other methods perhaps more familiar from digital humanities, but it remains a recognisable qualitative study within the fields of military and organisational history.

The second article in this issue, Anat Ben-David and Adam Amram's investigation of the “construction of historical facts” by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (IAWM), addresses questions of enormous historical interest, but from the standpoint of science and technology studies. The relative opacity of web archiving processes to non-specialists has been identified elsewhere as a significant barrier to the unlocking of their potential for research (Brügger, 2012; Brügger & Finnemann, 2013; Cowls, 2016, pp. 230–237; Winters, 2016), and this is a fascinating exploration of how knowledge is created in one web archive. Their conclusion, “that historical knowledge on the IAWM is generated by an entangled and iterative system comprised of proactive human contributions, routinely operated crawls, and a reification of external, crowd-sourced knowledge devices”, is a major contribution to the way we think about web archives and our ability to assess them critically. Ben-David and Amram's research also highlights the importance of serendipity – the chance survival of a web page or the random harvest of data. Their insights into the North Korean country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), and consequently into the workings of the Internet Archive, were in part made possible by a DNS leak in 2016 which “exposed” (or not quite, as it turned out) the existence of 28 .kp websites. The article is a truly impressive piece of forensic investigation, much like Ben-David's earlier work on reconstructing the vanished Yugoslav ccTLD (Ben-David, 2016).

The final article in this collection represents the view from the other side of the archive, as Svenja Kunze and Brendan Power detail the processes of “Capturing commemoration: the 1916 Easter Rising web archive project”. They describe institutional and international collaboration – the project involved the Library of Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford and the British Library – and the many challenges, legal, technical and methodological, that face memory institutions concerned with the archiving of the web. Their research highlights the importance of national and international anniversaries, and interest in commemoration more broadly, in driving decisions around selective web archiving. In the Republic of Ireland, there is no legislative requirement, or empowerment, to archive the .ie ccTLD (as there is, for example, in the UK, France and many other European countries). Consequently, any web archiving activity is both constrained and time-consuming. In this context, a major anniversary, indeed a “Decade of centenaries” in Ireland, can spark web archiving activity for which it might otherwise be difficult to make a case (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, n.d.). Even in those archiving institutions which do undertake regular national domain crawls, these often run in parallel with selective archiving – and this frequently focuses on major events and anniversaries. The British Library, for example, has special collections concerned with the First World War Centenary 2014–2018, the Forth Bridge 125th Anniversary, Magna Carta 2015, the Russian Revolution Centenary, and so on (British Library, n.d.). The importance of anniversaries, celebrations and commemorations for national cultural heritage is undeniable, as is the immediate recognition factor among the general public, but there is a concomitant risk of focusing on big names and great events to the exclusion of ordinary lives and voices. The emphasis on precisely those lives and voices in Kunze and Power's work is very much to be welcomed.

Taken together, these three articles encapsulate the sheer variety of research that can be supported by web archives, and their importance for reconstructing web and Internet histories. They also demonstrate the value of discussion and collaboration that breaks out of disciplinary and sectoral silos, drawing on knowledge and expertise wherever it can be found. The RESAW network was established in this spirit of openness and partnership, and this remains visible in the research that it continues to inspire.