Web Archaeology: An Introduction

Abstract

In this special issue of TMG – Journal for Media History, the focus is on the web history and especially on practices of web archiving. It showcases examples on how to actively engage as media scholars or as librarians and archivists with web archives and archived web-related born-digital sources. While it explores methods that deal with existing web archives, it will also address questions such as how to trace material retrospectively. In that sense, it is taking a ‘web archaeological’ approach, meaning that the focus is on actively uncovering the history of the web in its early days, emphasising the role of ‘digging’ and ‘reconstructing’ as central methods in tracing material objects (software, hardware, terminals, hard drives, cables, et cetera) and born-digital objects (websites, web elements like banners or avatars, blogs and vlogs, and many other forms of user-generated content).