Yesterday I was delighted to find in the mail my copy of an important new book of essays: The Historical Web and Digital Humanities: the case of national Web domains. It is published by Routledge and edited by Niels Brügger and Ditte Laursen.

I say it is important because it investigates for the first time a particular issue that is of immediate practical concerns for two quite distinct groups. The first – Web archivists in the world’s national libraries, and particularly those who work within a legal deposit framework – have sometimes to define and then certainly to work within a definition of the ‘national’ Web, and to understand how much of it they are able to archive. As the volume amply demonstrates, that task of definition is not straightforward, and has been dealt with in widely varying ways.

Outside the small but growing community of Web historians, there are many others (not least contemporary historians) who are not primarily interested in the Web itself, but in what a study of it can tell us about everything else. And the definition of the nation, of a shared but bounded space in which a political community speaks together, is the kind of question which has exercised historians of many periods and of other ‘new’ media. As I wrote in my own chapter:

The advent of the web presents historians with a new and somewhat perplexing question: where is it? What does it mean to think of the web in spatial and quasi-geographic terms? How may we write national histories of the web? Where did a particular website ‘live’? Of where was it a resident or citizen, so to speak?

The volume is important, too, because it explicitly tries to connect Web history with the larger field of digital humanities, where hitherto the two fields have been in only the loosest contact (rather to my surprise, I might add.) It is good to see the volume appear in Routledge’s series on Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities, which also carries work in more ‘traditional’ digital humanities areas.

Finally, the volume marks an important moment in the development of the discipline of Web history. Previous collections (in which my own work also appeared), all of them crucial in their way, have have been more specifically methodological in focus, and have been designed to make the case for the importance and the integrity of the discipline. Although each chapter made a contribution to its own particular field, those previous volumes did not contribute as a group to particular questions of history, or religious studies, or sociology. (See, for instance The Web as History (2017) or Web25 (2017), and the Sage Handbook of Web History (2018). This volume is the first for several years which speaks to a substantive issue of politics, history and sociology, as well as to archival science and the methodology of studying the archived Web.

The chapters fall into three sections: collecting and preserving national domains; methodological issues, and results and dissemination. I won’t try to summarise them here, save to say that each group of readers – archivists and scholars – should read each section, since their concerns overlap. As I’ve argued elsewhere, scholars need to understand more than they do about how archives come into existence, and (in this case) about the administrative histories of particular ccTLDs. Archivists will similarly gain a great deal from the discussions of method and dissemination in the second two parts, since those questions go to the heart of both archiving policy and the design of effective systems for discovery, playback and analysis of the archived Web.

Part One: Collecting and preserving a national Web domain
Kees Teszelszky on ‘reconstructing and saving the Dutch national web using historical methods’.
Sally Chambers, Peter Mechant, & Friedel Geeraert, on the PROMISE project in Belgium: ‘Towards a national web archive in a federated country’.
Ian Milligan and Tom Smyth on the Canadian .ca domain, and studying the web ‘in the shadow of Uncle Sam’.
Helen Hockx-Yu, Ditte Laursen, & Daniel Gomes on the curious case of the .eu domain.

Part Two: Methodological challenges
Jane Winters on the many archives of the UK web space.
Anat Ben-David on Palestine, Kosovo and the quest of national self-determination on the fringe of the Web.
My own chapter on Northern Ireland and the limitations of the ccTLD as proxy for the nation.
Niels Brügger, Ditte Laursen, & Janne Nielsen on establishing a corpus of the Danish web.

Part Three: Results and dissemination
Valérie Schafer explores the French web of the 1990s.
Rebecca Kahn on locating a national museum online (the British Museum).
Niels Brügger proposes a way towards the creation of a national web trend index.