INTRODUCING TRANSNATIONAL WEB ARCHIVE STUDIES

Since the mid-1990s, the World Wide Web (or simply: the web) has played an increasingly important role in many societies, and it constitutes one of the main pillars in today’s communicative infrastructures. Due to the fragility of born-digital media, the online web is disappearing at an unprecedented pace. Fortunately, since the mid-1990s, web archives have been established and have preserved a treasure trove of more than 25 years of digital sources. Nevertheless, the valuable digital sources collected by institutions, from the US-based Internet Archive to many national web archives, remain untapped resources that have not yet impacted research within the humanities and the social sciences to the degree that one would have expected. In addition, most of the emerging literature related to the research use of web archives focuses on national settings, whereas genuinely transnational studies are lacking. This book, The Routledge Handbook of Transnational Web Archive Studies, aims to draw attention to the many archived web collections and rethink the challenges and possibilities they constitute for transnational studies of past and present web communication.