Making Sense of the Web: Finding Community in the Geocities Web Archive

In the mid-1990s, as the Web became part of everyday life, GeoCities provided a sense of community to facilitate users’ first, often hesitant, steps into the world of Web publishing. At that time, GeoCities was one of the largest collections of non-commercialized, user-generated, public speech ever assembled. Along the digital “GeoAvenues” and in their “homesteads,” users developed a relationship with the Web that built a foundation for the blogging and social networking explosion of the 2000s. Rather than simply being a platform upon which users created individualized webpages, GeoCities users helped each other develop the site as a whole. Focusing particularly on the question of whether GeoCities was an online community, this paper demonstrates how a combination of computational reading (studying websites as a collective whole, rather than as individual documents) and more focused, targeted reading reveals GeoCities as a vibrant, interconnected community.

This paper also makes a methodological intervention. It explores the various file formats that historians need to learn to use to make these arguments: Web archives in the field can be a mix of metadata formats, formal Web archives, as well as hastily-saved guerilla file dumps. GeoCities is an excellent case study of the work that historians will need to do as we begin to ask historical questions of the 1990s.

For in the ruins of GeoCities, new users figured out their relationship to the Web. They were part of a larger community. As so much of our relationship with web services is now mediated by user interfaces and glossy tutorials, it is worthwhile to look back to the days of 1994 and how - spread across time and space - users figured out what the Web meant to them. GeoCities, a massive assemblage of non-commercialized public speech, presents an interesting way to explore early Web history.