Doing Web history with the Internet Archive: screencast documentaries
Open accessAbstract
Among the conceptual and methodological opportunities afforded by the Internet Archive, and more specifically, the WayBack Machine, is the capacity to capture and “play back” the history a web page, most notably a website's homepage. These playbacks could be construed as “website histories”, distinctive at least in principle from other uses put to the Internet Archive such as “digital history” and “Internet history”. In the following, common use cases for web archives are put forward in a discussion of digital source criticism. Thereafter, I situate website history within traditions in web historiography. The particular approach to website history introduced here is called “screencast documentaries”. Building upon Jon Udell's pioneering screencapturing work retelling the edit history of a Wikipedia page, I discuss overarching strategies for narrating screencast documentaries of websites, namely histories of the Web as seen through the changes to a single page, media histories as negotiations between new and old media as well as digital histories made from scrutinising changes to the list of priorities at a tone-setting institution such as whitehouse.gov.
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The site-biographical approach allows for longitudinal comparison and has been employed in previous research to trace the history of news organizations, government services, national web domains, and online communities.
“This site-biographical approach allows for longitudinal comparison and has been employed in previous research to trace the history of news organizations, government services, national web domains, and online communities (Arora et al., 2016; Brügger and Schroeder, 2017; Rogers, 2017).”
From Google Arts & Culture and the platformization of cultural heritage: Convergence, gamification, and shifting positions of institutional partners (2026) · cites this paper as Rogers, 2017
The “Website histories and the screencast documentary” section describes single-site biography as tracing change over time, with examples involving newspapers and whitehouse.gov. But “Web historiographies in brief” treats national-web archiving as a distinct tradition, and the paper does not establish that site biography has been used to trace online communities. Those parts of the collective claim are not supported by this source. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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Cao, T. L. (2026) · Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · doi:10.1177/13548565261431167
- Authors
- Rogers, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Amsterdam (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Rogers, Richard
- ORCID
- Rogers, Richard
- Venue
- Internet Histories
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2017-01-02
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1-2
- Pages
- 160-172
- ISSN
- 2470-1475 (ISSN-L)
- 2470-1483
- OpenAlex
- W2619856847
- Cited by
- 35
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3
- FWCI
- 37.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Internet Histories (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- media/rep/ (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- European Union's Horizon 2020 (732942)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Conservation › Digital and Traditional Archives Management
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › History of Computing Technologies
- Keywords
- web history, Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, web archiving, media history, digital history, Wikipedia edit history
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