Web traffic analytics as a historical source

 

Wayback Machine, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/19980208082551/http://free.polbox.pl/raport7.html

Wayback Machine, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/19980208082551/http://free.polbox.pl/raport7.html

This is a guest post from Marcin Wilkowski, first published at wilkowski.org. Marcin Wilkowski is a member of the Digital Humanities Laboratory at the University of Warsaw.

Lire ce billet sur le blog Web Archives for Historians de Ian Milligan et Peter Webster.

The World Made Meme

Internet memes—digital snippets that can make a joke, make a point, or make a connection—are now a lingua franca of online life. They are collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless users across vast networks. Most of us have seen the cat playing the piano, Kanye interrupting, Kanye interrupting the cat playing the piano. In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner argues that memes, and the memetic process, are shaping public conversation. It’s hard to imagine a major pop cultural or political moment that doesn’t generate a constellation of memetic texts. Memetic media, Milner writes, offer participation by reappropriation, balancing the familiar and the foreign as new iterations intertwine with established ideas. New commentary is crafted by the mediated circulation and transformation of old ideas. Through memetic media, small strands weave together big conversations.

Milner considers the formal and social dimensions of memetic media, and outlines five basic logics that structure them: multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread. He examines how memetic media both empower and exclude during public conversations, exploring the potential for public voice despite everyday antagonisms. Milner argues that memetic media enable the participation of many voices even in the midst of persistent inequality. This new kind of participatory conversation, he contends, complicates the traditional culture industries. When age-old gatekeepers intertwine with new ways of sharing information, the relationship between collective participation and individual expression becomes ambivalent.

For better or worse—and Milner offers examples of both—memetic media have changed the nature of public conversations.

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SAGE Handbook of Web History

Simon Gee Giraudot Geektionnerd CC By-Sa

Simon Gee Giraudot
Geektionnerd
CC By-Sa

The web has now been with us for almost 25 years: new media is simply not that new anymore. It has developed to become an inherent part of our social, cultural, political, and social lives, and is accordingly leaving behind a detailed documentary record of society and events since the advent of widespread web archiving in 1996. These two key points lie at the heart of our in-preparation Handbook of Web History: that the history of the web itself needs to be studied, but also that its value as an incomparable historical record needs to be inquired as well. Within the last decade, considerable interest in the history of the Web has emerged. However, there is no comprehensive review of the field. Accordingly, our SAGE Handbook of Web History will provide an overview and point to future research directions.

The editors, Niels Brügger, Megan Sapnar Ankerson, and Ian Milligan, have over twenty-five chapters in preparation. However, there are a few areas where we are soliciting additional chapters to round out our handbook. The focus of the chapters needs to be on the subject of Web history.
* Business histories of the Web;
* Web governance;
* E-Literature or Web Art;
* History of online social media;
* Dot-com Start-ups
* Memes
* Hacking and Activism
* Video on the Web
* Asia and the Web
If you are interested, they are soliciting 300 – 500 word abstracts by 10 October 2016. If you have any questions, or wish to discuss a potential submission, please e-mail us via Ian Milligan at i2millig@uwaterloo.ca. Final chapters will be a maximum of 7,000 words and would be due by 1 March 2017.

Cinq émissions sur France culture dédiées à l’histoire d’Internet

Capture d’écran 2016-09-02 à 07.58.45Présentées par Julien Goetz.
Les écouter

60/70’s : l’écho psychédélique du bout des tuyaux

70/80’s : cowboys nomades, astragale et feux de camps électriques

Les années 1990 : Un Web et des bulles

Les années 2000 : sous les pop-up, l’indépendance

Un Internet à la dérive. Des internets en résistance

Special issue : The Web’s first 25 years

F1.mediumA special issue on 25 years of the web, edited by Niels Brügger, is out in New Media & Society: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/18/7.toc

Niels Brügger
Introduction: The Web’s first 25 years
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1059-1065, doi:10.1177/1461444816643787
Articles

Paolo Bory, Eleonora Benecchi, and Gabriele Balbi
How the Web was told: Continuity and change in the founding fathers’ narratives on the origins of the World Wide Web
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1066-1087, first published on May 2, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643788

Michael Stevenson
The cybercultural moment and the new media field
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1088-1102, first published on May 2, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643789

Anat Ben-David
What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1103-1119, first published on April 28, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643790

Marta Musso and Francesco Merletti
This is the future: A reconstruction of the UK business web space (1996–2001)
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1120-1142, first published on April 28, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643791

Valérie Schafer and Benjamin G. Thierry
The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1143-1158, first published on April 27, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643792

Eric T Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, and Josh Cowls
The net as a knowledge machine: How the Internet became embedded in research
New Media & Society August 2016 18: 1159-1189, first published on May 5, 2016 doi:10.1177/1461444816643793

Il y a tout juste 25 ans …

An early color screenshot of the WorldWideWeb browser https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/08/25-years-ago-the-world-changed-forever/

An early color screenshot of the WorldWideWeb browser
https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/08/25-years-ago-the-world-changed-forever/

25 years ago, on 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, posted information about the WorldWideWeb project on the newsgroup (like a message board) alt.hypertext and invited wide collaboration – marking,  in one email, the Web’s introduction to the wider world.

voir la suite sur le site du W3C

PS: merci à Eric Arrivé de nous avoir signalé cette ressource.

 

Enquêtes sur les usages d’Internet

Dans la seconde partie  des années 1990 émergent plusieurs enquêtes sur les usages.

Par exemple :

Boullier, Dominique et Charlier, Catherine. A chacun son Internet. Enquête sur des usages ordinaires . In: Réseaux, volume 15, n°86, 1997. Modèles et acteurs de la production audiovisuelle. pp. 159-181. DOI : 10.3406/reso.1997.3118

Pouts-Lajus, Serge et Tiévant, Sophie. Observation des usages d’Internet dans différents lieux d’accès publicBulletin des bibliothèques de France (BBF), n° 5, 1999, p. 30-34. Disponible sur le Web : <http://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-1999-05-0030-004>. ISSN 1292-8399.

AOIR Pre-conference – 404 History Not Found: Challenges in Internet History and Memory Studies

aoir2016AoIR routinely hosts several preconference workshops before the main conference. Attendees must register to attend a preconference; the price of the preconference is included as part of the main conference. All workshops will be held on October 5th.

 

voir la liste des pré-conférences 

Parmi elle celle organisée par Camille Paloque-Bergès (HT2S Cnam, membre de Web90 ) et Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia):

404 History Not Found: Challenges in Internet History and Memory Studies

How did the Internet become relevant in today’s culture and politics? How were its codes and rules—whether technical, social or cultural—constructed, challenged, and normalized? How did net culture become a mass phenomenon of global importance? To understand why and how the “Internet rules” today, it is essential that we look back at the internet’s past. In this pre-conference, we will discuss the specific theoretical and methodological challenges that arise in the study of the internet through time and memory, for purposes of both historiography (what net histories and how?) and epistemology (net histories as an object of media research). Attendees will be invited to participate in three hands-on, interactive sessions organized around issues, sources and methods fundamental to researching net diachronicity.

Net history survives in unexpected places, unfolding through time and space, collapsing in on the present. The artifacts that surface may be incomplete or inscrutable absent their original contexts, requiring us to borrow creatively from other fields and develop new historical methods (Ankerson, 2011; Brügger & Finnemann, 2012; Paloque-Berges, 2016). From formal archives and oral histories to lingering web sites, software, and hardware artifacts, the material evidence of the past suggests a diversity of social, temporal, and technical regimes. Indeed, recent scholarship on early networks reveals a greater range of experiences, technologies, norms and motivations than is found in best-known histories of the internet (Brammer, 2015; Brunton, 2013; Driscoll, 2014; Hargadon, 2011; Mailland, 2015; Paloque-Berges, 2011; Rankin 2014, 2015; Russell, 2014; Russell & Schafer, 2014; Schafer & Thierry, 2012; Schulte, 2013; Streeter, 2011). In their wake, we question how to make sense of conflicts and contradictions while respecting the subjective lived experiences of individual participants. What is our responsibility to find and document hidden histories, obscure sources, and less visible networks? How will a richer understanding of the internet’s past change how we engage with its present and imagine its future?

This pre-conference will include three workshop sessions organized around core research challenges in net history: (1) epistemology, (2) sources and methodology, and (3) mediation and transmission. Selected participants, rather than present whole case studies, will intervene on specific challenges—for instance: theoretical paradoxes or deadlocks, methodological problem-solving, and demonstrations of born-digital artifacts. The audience will be involved by taking positions, suggesting ad-hoc solutions, and identifying common themes.

(…) This pre-conference will be a full-day workshop facilitated by Kevin Driscoll and Camille Paloque-Berges with support from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche project Web90. The discussions and hands-on activities will be accessible to all AOIR attendees but will be especially engaging for researchers encountering issues of temporality, memory, nostalgia, or a need to “go back in time” in their own work.

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