At the moment I have a chapter contribution to a book of essays working its way through the publication process. The abstract is below; I’d be very happy to share the paper privately, if people would care to contact me.

A shortened version of the paper is available as a video presentation.

Abstract
One unit of analysis within the archived Web is the ‘web sphere’, a body of material from different hosts that is related in some meaningful sense (following, broadly, the definition coined by Niels Brügger). This chapter outlines a method of reconstructing such a web sphere from the late 1990s, that of conservative British Christians as they interacted with each other and with others in the United States in relation to issues of morality, domestic and international politics, law and the prophetic interpretation of world events.

Using an iterative method of interrogation of the graph of links for the archived UK web, it shows the potential for the reconstruction of a web sphere from what is in effect an archive that has a finding aid, but one with only classmarks and without descriptions. It also demonstrates the kind of multi-source investigation necessary to uncover the archaeology of the early Web. Big data and small, printed sources, the traces of previous Web archiving efforts (even when unsuccessful), and echoes in the scholarly record itself: all these come into play.

I also propose a conceptual division of Brügger’s web spheres into two kinds, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, as distinguished by the ease with which its boundaries can be identified, and the speed with which they change.