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

A breakthrough early modern digital project

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

http://programminghistorian.org

Web Archives for Historians

@HistWebArchives , http://webarchivehistorians.org/

Changing cultures #1• close and distant reading

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

Conclusions • a utopian dream unfulfilled

• a genuine moral panic

• a justified conspiracy theory

Changing cultures #2-3• close and distant reading

• writing like social scientists

• thinking of sources as data

Journal of Open Humanities Data

http://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/

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 Websterpeter@websterresearchconsulting.com@pj_websterpeterwebster.mewebsterresearchconsulting.com