I was very happy last week to have two papers accepted to the upcoming RESAW conference, which will take place on June 5-6, 2025 at Siegen University. Both papers are emerging out of the project ‘Histories of the Danish web in the 1990s’.
The theme of the conference is ‘The datafied web’, and you can read more about the conference and the RESAW organisation here.
The first paper is entitled ‘Establishing which websites constituted a national web in the 1990s’, and it will present my results related to the establishing of which websites constituted the Danish web in the 1990s, including also a lot of reflections on how these results were established and what are the challenges in doing so.
The title of the second paper is ‘The early datafied web: Visitor counters on the Danish web in the 1990s’, and it discuss the emergence, spread and development of early visitor counters on the Danish web in the 1990s. Visitor counters were one of the earliest ways of datafying the web.
I am very much looking forward to presenting the two papers and to meeting a lot of great colleagues in Siegen next June. The two abstracts that were submitted are pasted below.
FIRST PAPER
Establishing which websites constituted a national web in the 1990s
When doing historical studies of the web one of the first and most fundamental tasks is to determine which web entities are within the scope of the study, be that web elements, web pages, websites, or web spheres. Depending on the concrete study the result is a list that identifies the web entities to be included, and with this list at hand researchers can try to retrieve the relevant web entities, e.g. in a web archive, and use them in their analyses. However, establishing such a list is not easy, because useful comprehensive sources and overviews are very often lacking.
This presentation investigates how a researcher can establish which websites constituted a national web in the 1990s, based on the ongoing research project ‘Histories of the Danish web in the 1990s’. The aim is to develop and test a method to identify Danish websites of the 1990s. The method used two overall approaches, each of which come with different sub-approaches.
(1) Finding old ccTLD domain name lists
Obviously, the list of registered domain names of the ccTLD .dk is a strong candidate when trying to establish a list of website domains of the past. The following sub-approaches were used:
- Contacting the existing ccTLD administrator: Punktum.dk, today’s administrator had not preserved old ccTLD lists, they were discarded in 2018 due to GDPR rules.
- Contacting previous ccTLD administrators: The .dk ccTLD had several administrators in the 1990s, just identifying these, let alone finding relevant staff to contact, is a challenge; this step has not yet been fully explored.
- Searching the websites of existing and previous ccTLD administrators in the Internet Archive: Spending a lot of time (and with a great deal of luck) and having access to the archived Danish web from the 1990s through a SolrWayback interface, including full-text search, was a huge success, and complete ccTLD lists from 1996 (Oct) and 1997 (Jan) were found.
(2) Reconstructing website domain names based on other sources
ccTLD domain names are important, but they do by no means constitute a complete list of existing domain names. In the Danish case only companies, organisations, and the like were entitled to buy a domain name until begin 1997, and therefore all other web actors had their websites hosted on web hotels, with web addresses like ‘inet.tele.dk/nielsbrugger’. This is one of the reasons why reconstructing website domain names is relevant, and here the following sub-approaches were used:
- .dk websites in existing web archives: Based on the above mentioned SolrWayback access a list of the .dk domain names that were present in the web archive was created, including sub-domains of web hotels.
- Outgoing links from .dk websites to .dk websites: A list of all outgoing links from all websites identified in step 2a was created and filtered to keep the website address where the website had not been archived (called ‘known unknowns’) which resulted in a list of .dk websites that were linked to (but not archived) and that may have existed in the past.
- Directories/lists/web hotels: Various web directories/lists/web hotels were identified and their listing of websites was used (due to scripting in the code they were not in all cases identified in the two previous steps).
- Other sources: Other sources were consulted, including print media (books, magazines), digital copies of news papers, and usenet groups and a number of websites were identified, in particular for the period before Oct 1996 when the Internet Archives started.
Based on these different approaches annual lists of Danish websites in the 1990s was establashed, as comprehensively as possible.
As this brief overview indicates, establishing a complete picture of which websites constituting a national web in the past is not straigh-forward, hence, claims to comprehensiveness of the analyses based on this material may be weakened.
In the presentation, all of the points above will be explained and evaluated in detail, and their potential use in other use cases will be debated.
SECOND PAPER
The early datafied web: Visitor counters on the Danish web in the 1990s
One of the earliest ways of datafying the web was web counters calculating the number of visitors on a website. Visitor counters were the only way that a website holder could get automatic feedback information from and about the visitors Although the information about the number of visitors was very limited and not very detailed it gave the website owner a sense of how popular the website was, while at the same time flagging this information for the users of the website.
This paper paper discuss the emergence, spread and development of early visitor counters on the Danish web in the 1990s. The paper takes the point of departure in the research project ‘Histories of the Danish web in the 1990s’. The paper is guided by the following research question: Which role(s) did visitor counters play as one of the early web’s fundamental infrastructure elements?
Based on this research question the paper presents an initial mapping by investigated the following aspects of the development of early visitor counters:
(1) Visitor counters, producers, companies, economy, market: An analysis of the main actors who produced visitor counters, including business model, and the market, from early handheld handcoding, via peer-to-peer distribution of relevant HTML-code to professional international web companies like Digits (digits.com) or Internet Audit Bureau (internet-audit.com), as well as Danish counter providers like chart.dk and Danmarks Top100 (danmarks-top100.dk), and web hotels like Cybernet (cybernet.dk).
(2) Technology: An analysis or how visitor counters were constructed, and how they worked on a website, including how they collected clicks and communicated with the visitor counter companies with a view for the website owner to become part of the top hit charts on the producers website.
(3) Statistics: A mapping of how many visitor counters existed on the Danish web in total and relative to the total number of websites.
(4) Network: An analysis of the hyperlink network between websites using a visitor counter, and the providers of counters.
(5) Website owners, use forms, and aesthetics: An analysis of which types of websites visitor counters were used on, and of how they were communicatively and aesthetically framed by the website owner, including wording, icons, placement on the web page etc.
Sources: Websites from the Internet Archive, extracted from the national Danish web archive Netarkivet, and accessed through a SolrWayback interface which allows for free text search and extraction of all elements of the web pages. Internal documents from visitor counter companies in so far this has been provided. Research interviews with a limited number of website holders from the 1990s.
The presentation will outline the results within each of the focus areas above, including how they interrelate.
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