The SAGE Handbook of Web History

Niels Brügger is Professor at Aarhus University, the School of Communication and Culture. In 2000 he co-founded the Centre for Internet Studies, Aarhus University, and he has headed the centre since 2010. Since 2014 Head of NetLab, a research infrastructure for the study of the archived web. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has authored a number of publications, among others Web 25: Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web (Ed., Peter Lang, 2017), The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (Ed. with Ralph Schroeder, UCL Press, 2017), and The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2018). He is co-founder (2017) and Managing editor of the international journal Internet histories: Digital technology, culture and society (Taylor & Francis/Routledge).  Ian Milligan is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, where he teaches Canadian and digital history. Ian′s work explores how historians can use web archives, the large repositories of cultural information that the Internet Archive and many other libraries have been collecting since 1996. He has published two books: the co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (2015) and Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada (2014). In 2016, Ian was named the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN)’s recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Award.

Historians of the twenty-first century need to understand both the history of the Web, and the kinds of histories that can be written with online sources. There is no better guide to this crucial dimension of contemporary life than the SAGE Handbook of Web History. With chapters on web archiving, ethical considerations, technology, platforms, visualization, computation, quantitative and network analyses and many other subjects, it promises to become a key resource, not only for so-called digital historians, but for any historian who uses a computer in his or her work.

• Foreword: The Web as Counterpart - Steve JonesIntroduction - Niels Brügger & Ian MilliganPart 01: The Web and HistoriographyChapter 1: Historiography and the Web - Ian MilliganChapter 2: Understanding the Archived Web as a Historical Source - Niels BrüggerChapter 3: Existing Web Archives - Peter WebsterChapter 4: Periodizing web archiving: Biographical, event-based, national and autobiographical traditions - Richard RogersPart 02: Theoretical and Methodological ReflectionsChapter 5: Web History in Context - Valérie Schafer & Benjamin G. ThierryChapter 6: Science and Technology Studies Approaches to Web History - Francesca Musiani & Valérie SchaferChapter 7: Theorizing the Uses of the Web - Ralph SchroederChapter 8: Ethical considerations for web archives and web history research - Stine LomborgChapter 9: Collecting Primary Sources from Web Archives: A Tale of Scarcity and Abundance - Federico NanniChapter 10: Network Analysis for Web History - Michael Stevenson & Anat Ben-DavidChapter 11: Quantitative Web History methods - Anthony CoccioloChapter 12: Computational Methods for Web History - Anat Ben-David & Adam AmramChapter 13: Visualizing Historical Web Data - Justin JoquePart 03: Technical and Structural Dimensions of Web HistoryChapter 14: Adding the Dimension of Time to HTTP - Michael L. Nelson & Herbert Van de SompelChapter 15: Hypertext Before the Web - or, What the Web Could Have Been - Belinda BarnetChapter 16: A historiography of the hyperlink: Periodizing the web through the changing role of the hyperlink - Anne HelmondChapter 17: How Search Shaped and Was Shaped by the Web - Alexander HalavaisChapter 18: Making the Web Meaningful: A History of Web Semantics - Lindsay PoirierChapter 19: Browsers and Browser Wars - Marc WeberChapter 20: Emergence of the Mobile Web - Gerard GogginPart 04: Platforms on the WebChapter 21: Wikipedia - Andy FamigliettiChapter 22: A Critical Political Economy of Web Advertising History - Matthew CrainChapter 23: Exploring Web Archives in the Age of Abundance: A Social History Case Study of GeoCities - Ian MilliganChapter 24: Blogs - Ignacio SilesChapter 25: The History of Online Social Media - Christina Ortner, Philip Sinner & Tanja JadinPart 05: Web History and Users, some Case StudiesChapter 26: Cultural Historiography of the ′Homepage′ - Madhavi MallapragadaChapter 27: Consumers, News and a History of Change - Allie Kosterich & Matthew WeberChapter 28: Historical studies of national web domains - Niels Brügger & Ditte LaursenChapter 29: The Origins of Electronic Literature as Net/Web Art - James O′Sullivan & Dene GrigarChapter 30: Exploring the memory of the First World War using web archives: web graphs seen from different angles - Valérie Beaudouin, Zeynep Pehlivan & Peter StirlingChapter 31: A History with Web Archives, Not a History of Web Archives: A History of the British Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine Crisis, 1998-2004 - Gareth MillwardChapter 32: Religion and Web history - Peter WebsterChapter 33: Hearing the Past: The Sonic Web from MIDI to Music Streaming - Jeremy Wade MorrisChapter 34: Memes - Jim McGrathChapter 35: Years of the Internet: Vernacular creativity before, on and after the Chinese Web - Gabriele de SetaChapter 36: Cultural, political and technical factors influencing early Web uptake in North America and East Asia - Mark McLellandChapter 37: Online pornography - Susanna PaasonenChapter 38: Spam - Finn BruntonChapter 39: Trolls and Trolling History: From Subculture to Mainstream Practices - Michael NycykPart 06: The Roads AheadChapter 40: Web archives and (digital) history: a troubled past and a promising future? - Jane Winters