A year ago we opened the KB_Datalab but up untill now it was mostly used for presentations. Last month however the room was used for the first time by two researchers who wanted to research the KB web collection.
Evolution museums
Researcher Nadia Povroznik (TU Darmstadt) was our first visitor. She used the secure environment to research the evolution of museums on the web. Supported by Willem Jan Faber and Iris Geldermans she used the SolrWayback and other tools she requested to conduct her research. She also thanked the KB Team in her LinkedIn message.
XS4ALL
The second visitor was Nathalie Fridzema from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. She is researching the early web and came to the KB for the XS4ALL collection. Nathalie and Iris Geldermans have teamed up for the upcoming RESAW congres in Siegen to present about their collaboration in their talk: Translating Web Data into Media History: A Methodological Reflection of Archiving and Analyzing the XS4ALL Homepage Collection. (see abstract down below).
Willem Jan Faber, Iris Geldermans and Nadia Povroznik in the KB_Datalab
RESAW: Translating Web Data into Media History: A Methodological Reflection of Archiving and Analyzing the XS4ALL Homepage Collection.
Friday June 6th: 11:00-12:30 Session 10C: Past Metrics
Nathalie Fridzema and Iris Geldermans
Web archives have become an invaluable resource for contemporary historical research, providing new primary sources and unique opportunities to investigate online cultures (Milligan; 2019). The increasing reliance on born-digital materials, such as websites, has led to the adoption of digital humanities methods in historical research, notably through the use of a “web-minded approach” (Brügger, 2018). This approach stresses the need to consider the specific characteristics of archived web pages, to be mindful of the processes behind their archiving, and to apply methods appropriate for working with such material. While historians have traditionally depended on source criticism, engaging with web archives requires additional skills and insights to interpret these digital artifacts and translate them into meaningful historical analysis. This paper examines the steps involved in this process, fostering dialogue between a web archivist and a media history scholar. It offers a methodological reflection on the types of data that are significant within web archives, why these are crucial for historians, and how they can be effectively incorporated into historical research.
Key aspects to both the archivist and historian concerning archived web collections will be discussed such as collection formation, metadata selection, and sample preparation for tools like the SOLR Wayback. Furthermore, the paper reflects how the various types of data included in a collection can be appropriated for DH methods like multi-modal content analysis, link analysis, or topic modelling. Preliminary phases should be taken into account as well, hence curatorial decisions and related technical considerations like harvest dates and crawl depth, will be examined too. All of these factors are to be considered by the web archivist, subsequently affecting the content of a collection as well as the material’s periodisation, authenticity, and thus the notions scholars can construct using them.
Historical research using the XS4ALL homepage collection archived at the Dutch Royal Library will form the exemplary base for this paper. This collection includes a variety of URLs of websites created by XS4ALL subscribers, who could design their own homepage (de Bode & Teszelszky, 2021). The collection presents notable cases to be considered by both archivists and historians. For example, it was harvested from a curated list of URLs rather than being indexed by search engines due to historical significance of XS4ALL. Furthermore, this period of the early web offers interesting obsolete technologies to be studied (i.e. Flash) or data challenges like independent websites that are not linked to any other URL, or lack inbound links altogether. Another technical aspect is that XS4ALL websites underwent a domain name change. The leading question is what web data aspects historians should know to properly use archived web collections.
This paper seeks to investigate the translation of web data into historical narratives by examining the XS4ALL homepage collection through both archival and historical lenses, employing a web-minded approach. This process is shaped by the interplay of curatorial, archival, and technical decisions that affect how digital-born materials should be interpreted and understood by scholars – a source that will continue to gain prominence in contemporary history research.