AHA Session 157
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Salon C 1&2 (Hilton Chicago, Lower Level)
Chair:
Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo
Panel:
Ian Glazman-Schillinger, Syracuse University
Katie Mackinnon, University of Copenhagen
Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo
Raul Nunes, Fluminense Federal University
Session Abstract
This roundtable explores the nascent field of “Web Histories” through the experiences of four researchers who are actively researching and writing on the early internet. While human interactions have been conducted via networked computers for over five decades now, the study of these historic networked communities is still emerging. Web histories as a cohesive field are largely disaggregated, with the Oxford Internet Institute’s The Web as History (2017) and The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (2019) serving as the most historiographically focused compendiums in the field, though these are both edited volumes of case studies. The profusion of recent monographs such as Kevin Driscoll’s The Modem World (2021), Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance (2019) and Averting the Digital Dark Age (2024), and Avery Dame-Griff’s The Two Revolutions (2023), among many excellent examples, demonstrate a growing need to understand the origins of internet cultures and communities. As historians continue to produce cultural analyses of the early internet, distinctions of methodology and source-bases are setting these works apart from traditional histories. Often these web histories find themselves in disparate fields of sociological, anthropological, information studies, or communications studies fields. This roundtable therefore seeks to establish the emergence of a cohesive, interdisciplinary study of “Web Histories” by exploring the methodologies, backgrounds, subjects of study, and research experience of the panelists, and inviting audience members to consider their own projects to address the continuity of web communities and mend ruptured digital memory. Given the inherently interdisciplinary nature of this endeavor, this roundtable is proposed jointly with a similar submission to the Association of Internet Researchers’ 2025 Annual Meeting.
Primary materials borne of computer communications require specific methodologies, which requires distinct methods than those used with other kinds of sources discrete from other source bodies. The inherently ephemeral nature of web materials—that they require specific, intentional maintenance and preservation—coupled with an iterative and evolving corpus requires considerations akin to those of oral histories. At the same time, materials published online since the advent of the hypertext protocols—which enable modern webpages to be linked together through often blue hyperlinks—are readily archivable. The interactivity of webpages renders them distinct from other forms of written, published materials—a book may have citations present but, without an extensive reference library, the average reader cannot access all materials referenced in a physical document. Materials from before the Internet Archive’s mass aggregation of webpages require their own careful consideration. Fragmentary materials referenced in secondhand oral testimonies, newspapers, and later webpages remind the historian of myriad established historical fields which read between the lines to recover unrecorded or irrecoverable pasts. This panel therefore draws on a breadth of experience from four researchers to begin establishing a cohesive methodology and approach to web histories and present this expertise to those interested in engaging in their own web histories.
