DCI Lecture: Prof. Brügger, “Understanding the archived web as historical source”

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Please join us on October 15, 2018 at 4:15pm in BL 728 for a DCI Lecture by  Niels Brügger, Professor in Internet Studies and Digital Humanities at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Abstract:

Since the online web disappears rapidly, any scholar who wants to include the web of the past in his study has to rely on that someone has archived the web. However, the archived web is a peculiar type of historical document, and as a research object it needs to be approached in different ways than other digital media. What is needed is a critical web archive literacy.

This presentation outlines the specific nature of the archived web, compared to the online web and to digitized documents such as newspapers. In addition, it identifies some of the main impacts that the nature of the archived web has on how it can be used as a scholarly source by media and web historians.

Bio:

Niels Brügger is Professor in Internet studies and Digital Humanities, and head of the Centre for Internet Studies as well as of the internet research infrastructure NetLab, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has published monographs and a number of edited books as well as articles and book chapters. Recent publications include The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2018),  Web25, a special issue of New Media & Society, The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (edited with Ralph Schroeder, UCL Press 2017), and Web 25: Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web (Peter Lang 2017). He is co-founder and Managing Editor of the newly founded international journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor & Francis/Routledge).