What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain

This article argues that the use of the Web as a primary source for studying the history of nations is conditioned by the structural ties between sovereignty and the Internet protocol, and by a temporal proximity between live and archived websites. The argument is illustrated by an empirical reconstruction of the history of the top-level domain of Yugoslavia (.yu), which was deleted from the Internet in 2010. The archival discovery method used four lists of historical.yu Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that were captured from the live Web before the domain was deleted, and an automated hyperlink discovery script that retrieved their snapshots from the Internet Archive and reconstructed their immediate hyperlinked environment in a network. Although a considerable portion of the historical.yu domain was found on the Internet Archive, the reconstructed space was predominantly Serbian.