Digital contemporary history: sources, tools, methods, issues
Dr Peter WebsterWebster Research and Consulting@pj_webster
Outline
• is contemporary history behind in digital
history?
• why is this so? (sources & rights)
• writing the history of the 1990s and beyond:
the coming shift to born-digital
• skills, networks and resources
• changing methods and cultures
Too many sources?BNB monographs (theology)
Period # Monographs
1950-54 4921
1970-74 6175
2000-2004 13714
The 20th century copyright black hole (Europeana)http://pro.europeana.eu/blogpost/the-missing-decades-the-20th-century-black-hole-in-europeana (image: CC0)
Modes of digitisation funding
• public research funding
• philanthropic
eg. Thatcher archive : margaretthatcher.org
• open government
eg. Hansard : hansard.millbanksystems.com
• commercial
eg. Times Digital Archive (to 2009)
.. which tend to produce UIs that are:
• generic (and inflexible)
• often expensive
• closed (no access to raw data)
• not transparent
Web archiving?
• Internet Archive the initiator (1996-)
• national, regional, local libraries/archives
• universities, NGOs
• content owners
• individuals
• IIPC : global consortium, c.50 members
Web archives in the UK
Temporal scope Content scope Access
Open UKWA 2004-present Selective Online
Legal Deposit UKWA
2013-present Comprehensive (for UK)
Onsite
JISC UK Domain Dataset
1996-2013 Comprehensive (for .uk)
Index only
UK Government Web Archive
1996-present UK government Online
Parliamentary Web Archive
2009-present UK parliament Online
Univ. of Oxford 2011-present University sites Online
Web Archives for Historians
@HistWebArchives , http://webarchivehistorians.org/
Creationism read from a distance• non-evolutionary account of human
origins
• modern
• a long history
• a feature of some parts of evangelicalism
• (anti-evolutionism, Intelligent Design)
The creationist web : three questionsA justified conspiracy theory about marginalisation of creationist voices?
A real danger or a moral panic (Truth in Science) ?
The web as friend of the marginalised opinion?
UK Host Link Graph (1996-2010)
2008 | newsimg.bbc.co.uk | youtube.com | 45
2008 | archbishopofyork.org.uk | flickr.com | 1
2002 | secularism.org.uk | geocities.com | 1
Public domain at: data.webarchive.org.uk
Approach • selection of key UK creationist sites
• extraction of all unique inbound referring hosts for 1996-2010
• inspection and classification
Changing cultures #2-3• close and distant reading
• writing like social scientists
• thinking of sources as data
Thinking in data: British Evangelical Networks • tracing careers of evangelical ministers
during a key period of expansion (1945-80)
• training, congregations, events, publications, para-church organisations
• crowd-sourced
• communal data
https://evangelicalnetworks.wordpress.com/
Changing cultures #4-5• close and distant reading
• writing like social scientists
• thinking of sources as data
• working in teams
• a new partnership with libraries/archives
Questions ? Peter [email protected]@pj_websterpeterwebster.mewebsterresearchconsulting.com