Probing A Nation’s Web Domain
Niels Brügger · 2017
This chapter looks at scrutinizing how an entire national Web domain and its developments over time can be studied. National Webs have been studied since 2000 and even the Web domain of an entire continent has been studied–namely, the African Web as early as 2002. The chapter argues that a nation’s Web domain can be considered a relevant object of study for historiography as well as a genuine and valuable historical source. Therefore, a temporal dimension with focus on developments and trends has to be added to studies of a nation’s Web, just as an archived web has to be at the core of the study. The main challenge when setting out to analyze the developments of a nation’s Web domain is that the Web of the past is gone. A nation’s web sphere can be characterized by going more into detail with the content that is actually found on the web pages.