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This special issue is the result of our second call for the Internet Histories Early Career Researcher Award. For the second time, in 2021, the journal Internet Histories has invited any interested early career researchers (masters students, doctoral students, and post-doctoral researchers) whose research focuses on the history of the Internet and/or the Web, and histories of digital cultures — or any historical topic within the scope of the Internet Histories journal, to apply for the award and to submit an original article.

This article investigates the vast field of conspiracy theories by focusing on the example of con- spiracy theories related to vaccine hesitancy. Conspiracy theories have been with us for a long time, and as any other type of semantic content they spread by travelling through media. Therefore, if one wants to understand how conspiracy theories proliferate, it is relevant to investigate the media roads by which they travel and that each offer different opportunities for establishing connections. It is obvious that within the last three decades the advent of digital media has opened up new road systems to support conspiracy theories’ getting around. This article focuses on one such road system, the World Wide Web, and how the hyperlink networks on the Danish web related to conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy have developed from 2006 to 2015. The article aims at (1) contributing to the development of methods that enables such a study, and (2) providing results about how these hyperlink networks have developed. The network analysis reveals that the potential exchange of ideas about vaccination between experts and non-experts is not facilitated by the media material structures in either of the years, since almost no links exist between the two actor types, at least not on the physical performative level of hyperlinks. Experts are connected, but non-experts as a whole tend to function as an archipelago of isolated islands — isolated from the experts, and by and large isolated from each other. This tendency has remained almost the same throughout the investigated period. News media that one could expect to function as brokers connecting experts and non-experts are not particularly well-connected in the network and ap- parently do not mediate between actor types. This article investigates the vast field of conspiracy theories by focusing on the example of con- spiracy theories related to vaccine hesitancy. Conspiracy theories have been with us for a long time, and as any other type of semantic content they spread by travelling through media. Therefore, if one wants to understand how conspiracy theories proliferate, it is relevant to investigate the media roads by which they travel and that each offer different opportunities for establishing connections. It is obvious that within the last three decades the advent of digital media has opened up new road systems to support conspiracy theories’ getting around. This article focuses on one such road system, the World Wide Web, and how the hyperlink networks on the Danish web related to conspiracy theories and vaccine hesitancy have developed from 2006 to 2015. The article aims at (1) contributing to the development of methods that enables such a study, and (2) providing results about how these hyperlink networks have developed. The network analysis reveals that the potential exchange of ideas about vaccination between experts and non-experts is not facilitated by the media material structures in either of the years, since almost no links exist between the two actor types, at least not on the physical performative level of hyperlinks. Experts are connected, but non-experts as a whole tend to function as an archipelago of isolated islands—isolated from the experts, and by and large isolated from each other. This tendency has remained almost the same throughout the investigated period. News media that one could expect to function as brokers connecting experts and non-experts are not particularly well-connected in the network and ap- parently do not mediate between actor types.

When Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz published their seminal book Media events: The live broadcasting of history in 1992, television occupied centre stage, whereas computer networks were only used by a limited number of dedicated nerds for sending emails or as newsgroups. Things have changed since 1992, and in particular since the late 1990s, television and digital media have co-existed and co-evolved in still more entangled ways. This article asks how the supplementing of television by a new media form, the web, has affected the ways that media events as understood by Dayan & Katz can unfold and be conceptualised. Based on a medium theory perspective where focus is more on ‘media’ and less on ‘event’ the article starts by tracing how Dayan & Katz understand television as a medium. Then follows a brief account of the vast literature about Media events with a particular focus on how digital media are conceptualised. With these two sections as a stepping stone, the web’s digital features are outlined, followed by a historical analysis of the interplay of the development of the web and a concrete media event, the Olympics from 1996 to 2016. Finally, this web historical outline is used to re-evaluate Dayan & Katz’ conceptualisation of media events. The analysis is guided by three themes — liveness, control and participation — that are pivotal in Dayan & Katz’ understanding of media events as well as in the history of the web. When Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz published their seminal book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History in 1992, television occupied centre stage, whereas computer net- works were only beginning to be used. Since the late 1990s, television and digital media have co-existed and co-evolved in still more entangled ways. In this article, I ask how the supplementing of television by a new media form, the Web, has affected the ways media events as understood by Dayan and Katz can unfold and be conceptualised. Based on a medium theory perspective where focus is more on “media” and less on “event”, I intro- duce the article by tracing how Dayan and Katz understand television as a medium. Then follows a brief account of the vast literature about Media Events, with a particular focus on how digital media are conceptualised. With these two sections as a stepping stone, the Web’s digital features are outlined, followed by a historical analysis of the interplay of the development of the Web and a concrete media event: the Olympics from 1996 to 2016. Finally, this web historical outline is used to re-evaluate Dayan and Katz’s conceptuali- sation of media events. The analysis is guided by three themes – liveness, control, and participation – pivotal for Dayan and Katz’s understanding of media events as well as the history of the Web.

This article uses Internet archives to explore the emergence and spread of the term ‘mHealth’ (mobile health technologies) in the Danish Web domain from 2006 to 2018, focusing on the actors that contributed to its evolution. We propose three methods for investigating the Web pages and Web sites that employed the term ‘mHealth’. Our findings highlight temporal developments in the use of ‘mHealth’, with diverse actors using it, though none clearly dominated. The article attends to challenges in working with Web archive data, and presents methods that can be used by others wishing to engage empirically with Internet archives, which remain vast, but largely under-exploited resources.

Research infrastructures such as buildings, shelves and staff responsible for the collections have always been established to support the research process. With the archived Web, research infrastructures come in new forms, opening up new possibilities, but also new challenges. One of the major challenges is that web archives provide the potential for an almost unlimited number of possible forms of researcher interaction, but not all of them can be supported by those archives, due to a mix of curatorial, technical, legal, economic and organisational constraints. Therefore, a new field of negotiation is open between web archives and research communities.

This article explores how archived Web sources can be used for historical studies of an entire national Web domain and its development over time. It presents the methodological challenges of large-scale studies using Web archive content and discusses the limitations and potential of this new type of study of Web history. It uses the entire Danish Web domain .dk from 2006 to 2015, as it has been preserved in the Danish national Web archive, as a case to exemplify how ‘a nation’ can be delimited on the Web and how an analytical design for this type of big data analysis using archived Web can be developed. This includes considering the characteristics of the archived Web as a historical source for academic studies as well as the specific characteristics of the data sources used. Our findings reveal some of the ways in which a nation’s digital landscape can be mapped by examining Web site sizes and hyperlinks, and we focus on discussing how these results shed light on the methodological challenges, reflections and choices that are an integral part of large-scale Web archive studies. The study demonstrates that hardware and software as well as human competences from various disciplines make it possible to perform large-scale historical studies of one of the biggest media sources of today, the World Wide Web.

Perception Under Golf-krigen skrev De adskillige avisartikler om krigen. Da jeg læste dem, havde jeg en fornemmelse af, at denne krigs forløb allerede var blevet forudsagt i Deres bøger fra 70'erne og 80'erne.

The internet is a born-digital medium, but for a number of years many histories of the internet have used traditional non-computational methods such as document analysis and interviews (e.g. Abbate...

What do the five papers of this special issue have in common? They certainly represent diverse approaches to internet histories. The first article by Sherly Haristya discusses “The efficacy of civi...

Digital humanities is an umbrella term for theories, methodologies, and practices related to humanities scholarship that use the digital computer as an integrated and essential part of its research and teaching activities. The computer can be used for establishing, finding, collecting, and preserving material to study, as an object of study in its own right, as an analytical tool, or for collaborating, and for disseminating results. The term "digital humanities" was coined around 2001, and gained currency within academia in the following years. However, computers had been used within the humanities for decades, starting with research fields such as humanities computing or computational linguistics in the 1950s, and later new media studies and internet studies. The historical development of digital humanities has been characterized by a focus on three successive, but co-existing types of digital material: digitized, born-digital, and reborn-digital material.

This conversation brings together leading experts within the field of computational methods. Participants were invited to discuss “Internet histories and computational methods”, and the debate focused on issues such as why scholars of internet histories should consider using computational methods, what scholars should be looking out for when they use these methods, how the process of collecting influences computational research, what impedes the use of computational methods, to what an extent internet historians should learn to code (or conversely, if developers should learn about historical methods), what are the most defining moments in the history of computational methods, and, finally, the future of using computational methods for historical studies of the internet.

This chapter investigates the textual constitution of time in smaller digital news outlets in differently sized UK communities with varying relations to the local, regional and national. This focus rests on a wish to nuance how online journalism textually constructs various temporalities, a subject that mainly has been studied on national outlets. By looking at smaller local sites, we wish to understand the constitution of time in types of outlets most often thought of in terms of geography. The chapter aims for both an empirical contribution in the form of documenting—albeit on a very small scale—how the local as continuity is a consistent temporal framing of space and change and a theoretical contribution outlining permanence as an overlooked digital affordance.

As much as news websites news can be characterised by speed and immediacy, they are also recognisable online periodicals, which accumulate preceding news items. This is, as with the constitution of time in general, linked to relations between change and continuity. This article aims to understand how the temporalities of online news have developed since the first news sites in the mid-1990s. The analytical starting point for this is that such temporalities must be understood as a complex interplay between textual elements on different and overlapping levels of the webpage. This article consequently employs a framework for webpage analysis that primarily focuses on the syntactical level where temporalities emerge as relations between textual elements that change at very different intervals. This framework is applied to examples from the different stages of The Guardian’s webpage from 1996 to the present retrieved from the Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ). The shifting constitutions of time that emerge through these analyses point towards how journalistic practices have interacted with and adopted the possibilities of the digital. Due to an inbuilt instability between textual elements on stored websites (as well as other characteristics of online archives), the construction of the empirical base stands in a complex relation to the analytical framework applied. As much as the article is a historical analysis of the temporality of online news, it, thus, also offers a range of methodological considerations as well as thoughts on avenues for further study of how journalism constitutes time within different institutional settings and on different media platforms.

Internet history has progressed from a history of the technology to a history of modern communication. It is now intimately entwined in all aspects of our lives, so “Internet history” will shortly ...