Title: From ‘History Web’ and ‘Web History’ to the ‘History of the Web’? Reflections from a project studying the origins of the World Wide Web.

Bio: Gabriele Balbi is Associate Professor in Media Studies at USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland). At this institution, he is also program director of the Bachelor in Communication, director of the China Media Observatory and he is Chair of ECREA Communication History Section and Vice Chair of ICA Communication History Division. His research focuses on media history. See here for more information: http://usi.to/cyi

Abstract: In this presentation I will provide an overview of the three main ways the relations between Web and history have been studied so far. Following Niels Brügger (2018), there can be 1) a ‘history Web’, where the Web is mainly taken as a platform to help historians in their daily work thanks to digitized sources, databases, and even the creation of websites dealing with history, and 2) a ‘web history’ which mainly focuses on websites, the material and software dimension of the past Web, and the archived web. I will introduce a third type (the ‘history of the Web’), where the political, economic, technical and cultural history of the Web itself is at the center. I will discuss: 1) why we need studies on the history of the Web, especially in its early stages; 2) which histories of the Web have been done so far, with a focus on its origins; 3) and finally, which kind of research on the early history of the Web can be done (and which ones cannot) thanks to the CERN Archives, recently accessed by our research group.