History in the era of abundance: web archives and historical research

Abstract

Can the 1990s be considered the history of the present? As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive
have been collecting for the past three decades. 

This article explores how this dramatic shift in our historical record changes the work of historians. It does so in two main ways. First, it outlines the approaches, methods, tools, and search functions that can help a historian turn web documents into historical sources. Secondly, it considers the implications of the size and scale of digital sources, which amount to more information than historians have ever had at their fingertips, and much of which are by and about people who have traditionally been absent from the historical record.
As a way to make these points tangible, it does so primarily through an in-depth case study of working with the GeoCities. com web archive, a collection of hundreds of millions of 1990s webpages.

Keywords

digital history, web archives, historiography, digital humanities

Author Biography

Ian Milligan

Doctor en Historia por la Universidad de York profesor asociado de historia en la
Universidad de Waterloo. Últimas publicaciones: History in the Age of Abundance?
How the Web is Transforming Historical Research (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2019); Niels Brügger e Ian Milligan, eds., SAGE Handbook
of Web History (London: SAGE, 2018).

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