Web 25

Web 25

Histories from the First 25 Years
of the World Wide Web

Edited by Niels Brügger

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brügger, Niels, editor

Title: Web 25: histories from the first 25 years

of the World Wide Web / edited by Niels Brügger.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2017.

Series: Digital formations; vol. 112 | ISSN 1526-3169
Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017008861 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3270-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-3269-8 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4064-8 (ebook pdf)

ISBN 978-1-4331-4065-5 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4066-2 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: World Wide Web—History.

Classification: LCC TK5105.888 W36745 2017 | DDC 025.042—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008861

DOI 10.3726/b11492

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006

www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the editor

Niels Brügger is a professor and the head of the Centre for Internet Studies and of NetLab at Aarhus University. His research interests include Web historiography and Web archiving. He has published several books within these areas, and is co-founder of the journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society.

About the book

Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Web. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Web has played an important role in the development of the Internet as well as in the development of most societies at large, from its early grey and blue webpages introducing the hyperlink for a wider public, to today’s multifacted uses of the Web as an integrated part of our daily lives.

This is the first book to look back at 25 years of Web evolution, and it tells some of the histories about how the Web was born and has developed. It takes the reader on an exciting time travel journey to learn more about the prehistory of the hyperlink, the birth of the Web, the spread of the early Web, and the Web’s introduction to the general public in mainstream media. Fur-thermore, case studies of blogs, literature, and traditional media going online are presented alongside methodological reflections on how the past Web can be studied, as well as accounts of how one of the most important source types of our time is provided, namely the archived Web.

Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web is a must-read for anyone interested in how our online present has been shaped by the past.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Introduction: Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web

Niels Brügger

Section One: The early web

Chapter One: Connecting textual segments: A brief history of the web hyperlink

Niels Brügger

Chapter Two: Constructing the biographies of the web: An examination of the narratives and myths around the web’s history

Simone Natale and Paolo Bory

Chapter Three: The web’s first ‘Killer App’: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s World Wide Web site 1991–1993

Jean Marie Deken

Chapter Four: Untangling the threads: Public discourse on the early web

Marguerite Barry

Section Two: The web of culture and media

Chapter Five: Inside the great firewall: The web in China

Michel Hockx

Chapter Six: Blogs as cultural products: A multidimensional approach to their diffusion in Italy (2001–2008)

Elisabetta Locatelli←v | vi→

Chapter Seven: Born outside the newsroom: The creation of the Age Online

Sybil Nolan

Section Three: Methodological reflections

Chapter Eight: The challenges of 25 years of data: An agenda for web-based research

Matthew S. Weber

Chapter Nine: Historical website ecology: Analyzing past states of the web using archived source code

Anne Helmond

Chapter Ten: The changing digital faces of science museums: A diachronic analysis of museum websites

Anwesha Chakraborty and Federico Nanni

Section Four: Web archives as historical source

Chapter Eleven: Users, technologies, organisations: Towards a cultural history of world web archiving

Peter Webster

Chapter Twelve: Revisiting the World Wide Web as artefact: Case studies in archiving small data for the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA Archive

Paul Koerbin

Chapter Thirteen: Looking back, looking forward: 10 years of development to collect, preserve, and access the Danish web

Ditte Laursen and Per Møldrup-Dalum

Chapter Fourteen: Usenet as a web archive: Multi-layered archives of computer-mediated communication

Camille Paloque-Berges

Contributors ←vi | vii→

List of Figures

Figure 4.1: No. of articles making reference to the ‘world wide web’ in major (English language) international newspapers on a monthly basis from August 1991 to December 1995 (Source: LexisNexis search results)

Figure 7.1: Earliest image of The Age Online still extant on the Wayback Machine. By this time, the copyright dispute had been resolved, and reporters’ stories ran in full on the site. Screenshot: June 2, 2016

Figure 7.2: Fairfax advertising site running on the Age Online, May 1996. Screenshot from the Wayback Machine, November 3, 2015

Figure 9.1: The number of trackers that have been detected by the Tracker Tracker tool per year on the archived NYT front pages in the IAWM between 1996 and 2011

Figure 9.2: Names and types of the trackers that have been detected by the Tracker Tracker tool per year on the archived NYT front pages in the IAWM between 1996 and 2011

Figure 10.1: The Deutsches Museum website in a snapshot from 1998

Figure 10.2: The virtual museum ‘Leonardo Virtuale’ on the website of Museo della Scienza

Figure 10.3: The homepage of the Science Museum in a snapshot from 2007

Figure 13.1: Amount of data harvested from the .dk TLD with an error in the 2010 data analysis

Figure 13.2: Amount of data harvested from the .dk TLD

Figure 13.3: Chart of the development of .dk domains

Figure 13.4: Number of harvested documents relative to the total count for each harvest and grouped by HTTP response codes

Figure 13.5: Number of harvested documents relative to the total count for each harvest and grouped by HTTP response codes ←vii | viii→

Figure 13.6: Amount of data harvested relative to the total amount for each harvest and grouped by HTTP response