Niels Brügger

• PhD
• Professor at Aarhus University

Given recent global crises, the imperative to preserve and analyze online content has never been more vital to enhancing our comprehension of contemporary changes. This book, the outcome of the 5th international RESAW conference that convened experts from fifty disciplines across seventeen countries in Marseille in June 2023, tackles the multifacet...

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/...

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 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 t...

This article investigates the vast field of conspiracy theories by focusing on the example of conspiracy 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 prolif...

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 highlig...

This article discusses the importance of web archives making their collections available as data and not only as sources seen through the Wayback Machine’s interface where only individual web pages are displayed. This will help unlock the full potential of the treasure trove that web archives constitute, and thereby also open up for methods from th...

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 f...

This article outlines how the 'digital geography' of a nation can be studied, that is the online presence of one nation. The entire Danish Web domain and its development from 2006 to 2015 is used as a case, based on the holdings in the Danish national Web archive. The following research questions guide the investigation: What has the Danish Web dom...

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....

Since the mid-1990s the Internet and the web have become increasingly more important pillars in the communicative infrastructure of most societies, and their impact on traditional media and journalism has been fundamental. Even though there appears to be an obvious link between these two facts, both the Internet and digital media are a much broader...

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 u...

An original methodological framework for approaching the archived web, both as a source and as an object of study in its own right. As life continues to move online, the web becomes increasingly important as a source for understanding the past. But historians have yet to formulate a methodology for approaching the archived web as a source of study....

Web 25: Histories from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Web. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Web has played an important role in the development of the Internet as well as in the development of most societies at large, from its early grey and blue webpages introducing the hyperlink for a wider pu...

In “Connecting textual segments: A brief history of the web hyperlink” Niels Brügger investigates the history of one of the most fundamental features of the web: the hyperlink. Based on the argument that the web hyperlink is best understood if it is seen as another step in a much longer and broader history than just the years of the emergence of th...

The World Wide Web has now been in use for more than 20 years. From early browsers to today’s principal source of information, entertainment and much else, the Web is an integral part of our daily lives, to the extent that some people believe ‘if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist’. While this statement is not entirely true, it is becoming increasin...

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 mid 1990s the World Wide Web - or simply: the Web - has become a cornerstone in our communicative infrastructure, and large portions of our individual and societal lives cannot be fully understood without adding the Web to the equation. However, the Web disappears at an unprecedented pace compared to other media types which is why nationa...

In this article it is argued that one of the major transformative factors of the humanities at the beginning of the 21st century is the shift from analogue to digital source material, and that this shift will affect the humanities in a variety of ways. But various kinds of digital material are not digital in the same way, which a distinction betwee...

Todays expanding digital landscape constitutes an important research object as well as the research environment for the Humanities at the beginning of the 21st century. Taking this state of affairs as a starting point this inaugural lecture presents a vision for how the digital affects the interplay between four areas which until now to a certain e...

This paper tells a history of Facebook from 2004 to 2013. It presents the big picture by focusing on Facebook as it presented itself to a user, that is the available semiotic and interactional elements (e.g., profile, wall, feed, commercials, etc.) as well as the functions and useforms which these elements made possible for a variety of actor types...

I argue that web historiography should be placed higher on the Internet Studies’ research agenda, since a better understanding of the web of the past is an important condition for gaining a more complete understanding of the web of today, regardless of our focus (e.g. political economy, language and culture, social interaction or everyday use). Bui...

This article discusses some of the fundamental methodological challenges related to doing historical network analyses of the web based on material in web archives. Since the late 1990s many countries have established extensive national web archives, and software supported network analysis of the online web has for a number of years gained currency...

Since the mid-1990s the Web has constituted an increasingly important source for studies of the recent history of society and culture, and a number of national and international Web archiving institutions have been established. This article discusses the different characteristics of Web materials and archived Web materials. It is argued that both o...

Website Historiography. Mapping some Fundamental Challenges This article discusses some of the fundamental challenges facing website historiography. A definition of ‘website’is outlined, and the specific nature of the archived website is identified. With this as a stepping stone some methodological consequences of the characteristics of the website...

This Afterword compares the articles in this issue of MIA to the 'first wave' of Australian internet historiography, a field of study established by Australian internet scholars around 2000. After identifying what is new in the present issue, I outline four paths that may be worth considering in the future: constituting the field based on shared th...

Taking as point of departure that since the mid-1990s the web has been an essential medium within society as well as in academia this article addresses some fundamental questions related to web historiography, that is the writing of the history of the web. After a brief identification of some limitations within digital history and internet studies...

Web Archiving and Archiving StrategiesA Brief History of Web ArchivingThe Archived Web DocumentWeb Philology and the Use of Archived Web MaterialThe Future of Web ArchivingReferences

This article puts on the agenda one of the fundamental theoretical questions within the emerging field of website history: how can the object of historical study — the website — be delimited? Its focus is on the 'website' artefact as a medium and a text. After elaborating a definition of the website, as well as discussing how the website is distinc...

Website history can be considered an emerging discipline at the intersection between media history and Internet history. In this discipline, the individual website is regarded as the unifying entity of the historical analysis rather than the Internet or the Web. Writing the history of a website involves using many sources and methods similar to tho...

Eine der einflussreichsten Strömungen der Wissenschaftstheorie unserer Zeit Diese Einführung konzentriert sich auf den "französischen" Strukturalismus und nimmt die strukturelle Sprachwissenschaft F. de Saussures als Ausgangspunkt. Den Leitgedanken bildet dabei die Frage, wie das Erbe Saussures im 20. Jahrhundert verwaltet wurde. Ins Blickfeld gera...

Taking as a point of departure that the website constitutes an important analytical unit for the analysis of Internet activities, this article discusses to what extent the work of Bolter and Manovich can contribute to the clarification of what characterizes the website as a phenomenon in its own right. Focus is on the second edition of Bolter's Wri...