The Historical Development of the Danish Web

• In Event: Toward Multiplicity and Complexity: Examining World Wide Webs

Abstract

Although the web has become a cornerstone in most societies’ communicative infrastructure it disappears at an unprecedented pace — the average lifetime of a webpage is said to be no more than two months. This is probably one of the reasons why historical studies of large portions of the web such as a national web domain have not been made: the object of study has simply disappeared. Therefore, we lack knowledge about what an entire national web as such actually looked like, what was actually available for a user to use? — and how has this developed over time? Since the late 1990s large national web archives have been established, and in a number of countries entire national webs have been archived. This treasure trove is just waiting to be studied, and it is the only way to approach an answer to the questions above. This presentation reports the first results from a large-scale study of the historical development of an entire national web domain, namely the Danish web from 2005 to 2015. The study is analyzing archived web from the Danish web archive Netarkivet, and it is based on an analytical design with the following five focal points: 1) size (size of the entire national web, of file types, and of websites), 2) space (geographical distribution of websites), 3) structure (networks of hyperlinks), 4) ’Aliveliness’ (new/disappeared domain names and frequency of updating), 5) content (file and software types, language, textual elements, and semantics (e.g. word frequencies, sentiment analysis/topic modelling). The results of the web analysis will be compared to developments outside the web for instance the geographical distribution of the population, economic and political power (companies, political parties, etc.), the most important topics of the year, migration, travelling, and trade.

Author

• Niels Brugger, Aarhus U