Title: Asian Internet & mobile media histories: Reflections for (trans)national web heritages

Bio: Gerard Goggin is Wee Kim Wee Professor of Communication Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is also Professor of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. Gerard has longstanding interests in mobile media and communications, Internet histories, and disability, emerging technology, and human rights. He is a founding co-editor of the journal Internet Histories.

Abstract: The historical study of Internet and digital cultures has achieved a considerable amount to date. This includes significant efforts to build and nurture infrastructures, collections, repositories, and tools to ‘rebirth’ digital information and media, build capabilities for its study, engage with the emergence of digital humanities, and systematically theorize and develop a field (Brügger et al., 2017; Brügger & Schroeder, 2017; Gomes et al., 2021).

In the year that the most widely known initiative in the area –– the Internet Archive –– turned 25 years old, and as the world seeks to imagine and rebuild life after a pandemic, in which extending digitization was a watchword, it is timely that this WARCnet is seeking to consolidate, reflect, and transform the field.

In this keynote, I will offer discuss the state-of-play and roads ahead for (trans)national web heritages by reflecting on two related areas that pose considerable challenges: Asian Internet histories; and mobile media histories.

In doing so, I draw on a new collection of papers on Asian Internet histories (Goggin, Yu, & Lee, 2021), as well as the conceptualization of global Internet histories developed by Mark McLelland and myself in editing the volume Global Internet Histories (Goggin & McLelland, 2017). I also draw on an emerging body of work on mobile web (Goggin, 2018) mobile media histories (Balbi & Berth, 2019; Balbi & Magaudda, 2018) and, especially Anne Helmond and Fernano van der Vlist’s germinal work on app and platform histories (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2021) as well as other key apps studies work (Dieter et al., 2019; Goggin, 2021).

The two areas are often associated, because of the twinned importance of the evolution of mobile media in Asian Internets (Athique & Parthasarathi, 2020; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Steinberg, 2019). This conjunction is something emblazoned in our contemporary times and future imaginaries, so all the more reason to consider what insights it offers for archival, historiographic, infrastructural, conceptual, and methodological challenges and innovations in web, Internet, and digital cultural histories

References

Athique, A., & Parthasarathi, V. (2020). Platform capitalism in India. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44563-8

Balbi, G., & Berth, C. (2019). Towards a telephonic history of technology. History and Technology, 35(2), 105–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959

Balbi, G., & Magaudda P. (2018). A history of digital media: An intermedia and global perspective. Routledge.

Brügger, N. (2016). Introduction: The Web’s first 25 years. New Media & Society, 18(7), 1059–1065. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816643787

Brügger, N., Goggin, G., Milligan, I., & Schafer, V. (2017). Introduction: Internet histories. Internet Histories (2017), 1(1-2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1317128

Brügger, N., & Schroeder, P. R. (2017). The Web as history: Using Web archives to understand the past and the present. UCL Press.

Dieter, M., Gerlitz, C., Helmond, A., Tkacz, N., van der Vlist, F. ., & Weltevrede, E. (2019). Multi-situated app studies: Methods and propositions. Social Media + Society, 5(2), 205630511984648. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486

Goggin, G. (2018). Emergence of the mobile Web. In N. Brügger & I. Milligan (Eds.), Sage handbook of Web history (pp. 297-311). Sage.

Goggin, G. (2021). Apps: From mobile phones to digital lives. Polity.

Goggin, G., & McLelland, M. (2017). Introduction: Global coordinates of Internet histories. Routledge companion to global Internet histories (pp. 1-19). Routledge.

Goggin, G., Yu, H., & Kwang-Suk, L. (2021). Asian Internet histories: An introduction. Internet Histories. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2021.1988239

Gomes, D., Demidova, E., Winters, J., & Risse, Th. (Eds.). (2021). The past web: Exploring Web archives. Springer.

Helmond, A. &van der Vlist, F. N. (2021). Platform and app histories: Assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories. In D. Gomes, E. Demidov, J. Winters, et al. (Eds.), The past Web: Exploring Web archives (pp. 203-214). Springer.

Ito, M., Okabe, D., & Matsuda, M. (Eds.). (2005). Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. MIT Press.

Jin, D. Y. (2017). Smartland Korea: Mobile communication, culture, and society. University of Michigan Press.

Nieborg, D. B. (2021). Apps of empire: Global capitalism and the app economy. Games and Culture, 16(3), 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020937826

Steinberg, M. (2019). The platform economy: How Japan transformed the consumer Internet. University of Minnesota Press.

Title: The challenges of preserving the web: a current overview of the Brazilian context

Abstract: Much is said about web archiving, where several organizations do the digital preservation, but the fact is that many countries still do not have legislation and/or applied resources to preserve their websites and domains. This presentation will bring the advances we have had in recent years in Brazil in this field and what we still need to do to preserve the .br domain and promote the use of web archives by researchers and the general public.

Short bio: Dr Moisés Rockembach is Professor at the Department of Information Science, Faculty of Library Science and Communication at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). PhD in Information and Communication in Digital Platforms, with Post-Doctorate at the University of Porto (Portugal). Researcher leader at the Research Group on Web Archiving and Digital Preservation at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Brazil), works with web archiving, archival science, digital preservation and information science.

Title: Where the Web ends: the technological and cultural challenges of Web archiving in Italy

Bio: Chiara Storti is digital librarian at the ICT Department of the National Central Library of Florence (BNCF), Italy. She is the manager of digital legal deposit and web archiving services.

Under her management, BNCF has adopted Folio, the first community open source library service platform.
She is a member of the working group on digital libraries of the Italian Library Association (AIB).
She is passionate about Wikimedia projects for GLAM institutions and promoter of free-culture, open source and open access movements.

Abstract: In Italy, there is still not a digital legal deposit and web archiving law. However, since 2018, the National Central Library of Florence has a web archiving service to preserve the Websites of national cultural interest. The aim of the presentation is to show the main challenges that the Library addresses and the possible solutions: from the definition of collections policy to the problem of finding economic, human and technological resources.

Title: Archiving the Web for Qatar: challenges and opportunities for Qatar National Library

Bio: Dr. Arif Shaon is a Senior Digital Curation Specialist in the Digital Content and Engagement department of Qatar National Library (QNL). In this role, he contributes to the development and sustainability of the QNL data curation and preservation infrastructure.

In a career spanning over a decade, Arif has held several varied positions in UK and Australia, ranging from undertaking research to providing technical leadership in areas including research data management, digital preservation and advanced environmental informatics. His past notable endeavours include the development of a sustainable infrastructure for research data service and digital preservation for the University of New South Wales Australia (UNSW) Library.  He also provided technical leadership to European and UK projects in Linked Data and digital preservation to support the Open Data initiative of 2009-2012.

Abstract: Web-based resources from news portals, social media platforms and other types of institutional websites of scholarly and cultural importance are part of a nation’s intellectual output that should be digitally preserved over the long-term. Access to such content would provide the future generations with an account or interpretation of important current events that may not be captured or recorded anywhere else. Long-term preservation of Arabic web-based content should also be of special importance as these are underrepresented in the international efforts of web archiving.

Web archiving is an important initiative within the wider mission of the Qatar National Library (QNL) to support Qatar on its journey towards a knowledge-based economy by curating, preserving and disseminating the country’s digital heritage for both current and future generations. This talk provides an overview of QNL’s approach to archiving websites containing information pertinent to Qatar, and highlights the challenges associated with developing archived websites as collections for the Library patrons.