Beskrivelse
It is a fundamental truth that any comprehensive contemporary history will have to scrutinize human activity on the World Wide Web. In the British case, archived websites are available through the Internet Archive and the British Library’s data holdings back to 1996 – or 26 years ago. Given the tradition in the British historiography of following “the thirty-year rule” (named after the typical period that government documents remain classified in The National Archive), even historians who have avoided critically engaging with born digital sources will soon no longer be able to do so. Unfortunately, a combination of the relative novelty of web archives and a lack of methodological focus on their utility in contemporary history has meant not enough work has been actively pursued in this area.This paper follows my previous interventions at RESAW and elsewhere by giving a concrete example of how I have used web archives in my own longer histories of Britain’s postwar welfare state. Though my work has clearly evolved with first-hand experience of using such archives, limitations remain. My latest project concerned sickness certification in British social security policy since the 1940s. I argue that web archives gave a unique perspective on this issue by providing evidence of engagement with the state as British citizens posted about their present and historical experiences of sickness, health and welfare in blogs and message boards. These were identified using the British Library’s SHINE interface. Working alongside, rather than separate to, “traditional” documentary and oral history evidence, I argue that this research shows how historians will need to adapt to accommodate archived web pages – while also acknowledging the potential limitations of my approach based on my own resource constraints, concerns with research ethics, and continuing methodological naivety.
| Periode | 17. okt. 2022 |
|---|---|
| Begivenhedstitel | WARCnet Closing Conference |
| Begivenhedstype | Konference |
| Placering | Aarhus, DanmarkVis på kort |
| Grad af anerkendelse | International |