Short description:

The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies explores the untapped potential of web archives for researching transnational digital history and communication. It covers cross-border, cross-collection, and cross-institutional examination of web archives on a global scale.

Long description:

The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies explores the untapped potential of web archives for researching transnational digital history and communication. It covers cross- border, cross- collection, and cross- institutional examination of web archives on a global scale.

This comprehensive collaborative work, emerging from the WARCnet research network, presents an exploration of the ways web archive research can transcend technological and legal challenges to allow for new comparative, transnational studies of the web?s pasts, and of global events. By combining interdisciplinary work and fostering collaboration between web archivists and researchers, the book provides readers with cutting- edge approaches to analyzing digital cultural heritage across countries. The book contains concrete examples on how to research national web domains through a transnational perspective; provides case studies with grounded explorations of the COVID- 19 crisis as a distinctly transnational event captured by web archives; offers methodological considerations while unpacking techniques and skill sets for conducting transnational web archive research; and critically engages the politics and power dynamics inherent to web archives as institutionalised collections.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies is an essential read for graduate students and scholars from internet and media studies, cultural studies, history, and digital humanities. It will also appeal to web archiving practitioners, including librarians, web curators, and IT developers.

Table of Contents:

Lists of figures; List of maps; List of tables; List of contributors; 1 Introducing transnational web archive studies; 2 ?History web?, ?web history?, and ?history of the web?: Three subfields and why (and why not) integrating them; Part I:  Entire national web domains from a transnational perspective ? 3 Iconography in flux: A transnational exploration of the evolution of climate news imagery through the Wayback Machine; 4 Comparing the holdings of closed national web archives through summaries; 5 Exploring the evolution of .lu domain names through a transnational comparison: Similarities and differences between .lu and .dk; 6 Comparing national web domains across national web archives: Methodological and practical challenges of doing transnational studies; 7 Conversation 1: Transnational; Part II: The COVID-19 crisis as a transnational event ? 8 Oral histories and scalable reading: Analysing born-digital collecting practices during the COVID-19 pandemic; 9 Surveying the landscape of COVID-19 web collections in European GLAM institutions: An explorative analysis; 10 What can we learn from URLs? Understanding the scope of COVID-19 web archive collections for transnational analyses; 11 The challenges of searching for women in the COVID-19 web archive collections: Promises, achievements, and pitfalls; 12 Conversation 2: Events; Part III: Methods and skills in web archive studies ? 13 Information ecosystems through the lens of web archives; 14 History of virtual museums and web archives: Opportunities for rescaling research; 15 Exploring skills and training requirements for the web archiving community; 16 Teaching web archiving in higher education: Best practices and future perspectives; 17 Conversation 3: Communities; Part IV: Politics of web archives as collections ? 18 The trouble with community: Constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing transnational ?community? micro-archives; 19 An inclusive approach to web archiving: The case of the Middle East and North African websites in the IIPC Novel Coronavirus collection; 20 The many lives of WeChat: Curating histories of the web in museum environments; 21 Participation, platforms and cultural heritage: Web archiving challenges; 22 Building an archive of historical web defacements; 23 Conversation 4: Institutional challenges; Part V: Institutional challenges ? 24 Screens in struggle: From archived web corpus to readable data for history research; 25 Towards transnational research data management practices for web archives: Challenges and possibilities; 26 The importance of legal requirements for web archives studies in Belgian and French law; 27 Public policies, technological infrastructure and uses of web archives by the Digital Humanities in Brazil; 28 Conversation 5: The future; Glossary; Index.