Historical Web as a Tool for Analyzing Social Change

Abstract

This chapter discusses how the World Wide Web can be used as a resource for historians and social scientists. The web has existed for more than two decades and been used for many purposes, including as a source of information, entertainment, and much else. It has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Future historians and social scientists are therefore bound to look to the web, its content, and structure, to understand how society was changing – just as they have used various records such as letters, novels, newspapers, radio, television, and other artifacts as a record of the past for the pre-digital era. This chapter explores how scholars can make use of the archived web as a source for understanding historical patterns of culture and society, including the challenges they face in doing so.