The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies

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.

Susan Aasman is Professor in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). Her expertise is in the field of media history with a focus on digital media and web historiography and the new emerging field of web archaeology. She is interested in private, common, and institutional digital archival practices and discourses.

Anat Ben-David is an Associate Professor of Communication at the Open University of Israel. Her research focuses on internet histories, digital technologies, and the intersection of politics and knowledge. Her work in web archive studies critically examines how archival infrastructures and geopolitics shape the web’s pasts and explores new methods for advancing critical web archive research.

Niels Brügger is Professor at Aarhus University, School of Communication and Culture. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving, and media theory. Within these fields he has authored a number of publications, including Web 25: Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web (Ed.; Peter Lang, 2017), and The archived web: Doing history in the digital age (MIT Press, 2018).