This research project has matured for several years, and it therefore comes with its own pre-history. The primary impetus was another research project which I started in 2006, ‘The history of dr.dk, 1996-2006‘ (funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in 2007-10), with the aim of writing the history of the first ten years of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s (DR) website. However, it soon became clear to me that I needed to know more about the context in which dr.dk emerged, that is: the Danish web.
In the following years I did get involved in the establishing of the Digital Humanities Lab, a national research infrastructure for humanities studies of digital material, as well as I co-founded RESAW, a Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials — time went by with these new projects, and I never finished the history of dr.dk. But the idea of writing the history of the Danish web stuck, and in 2014 I launched the project ‘Probing a Nation’s Web Domain — the Historical Development of the Danish Web‘ that focused on studying the entire Danish web 2005-2015 by the use of the content in the national Danish web archive Netarkivet, and by the use of digital methods. This project ran until the early 2020s.
In the beginning of the 2020s time seemed ripe to finally combine my previous interests by doing a comprehensive study of the first 25 years of the Danish web by combining traditional historiographical methods with digital methods.
To get a sense of how digital methods could be used to study the development of a limited number of individual websites I launched a test project in 2023 about the history of Danish football clubs’ websites 1996-2021, based on digital as well as non-digital sources. However, it soon became clear that extending the methods and analyses from the test project to the entire Danish web for 25 years would result in a too big and superfluous project, because the available source material was very extensive and dense, and there were simply too many histories to be told.
Therefore, instead of only scratching the surface of 25 years of Danish web I decided to make an extensive and thorough analysis of the founding period 1991-2000 when the Danish web was established.
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