RESAW19: THE WEB THAT WAS: ARCHIVES, TRACES, REFLECTIONS
PROGRAM

Days: Tuesday, June 18th Wednesday, June 19th Thursday, June 20th Friday, June 21st

Tuesday, June 18th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

09:30-13:00 Session 2: Hacking the news
Location: BG2 0.02
09:30
Hacking the News: from digitised newspapers to the archived-web: an introductory workshop to text and data-mining (abstract)
13:00-14:00Lunch break (self-catered)
14:00-17:30 Session 3A: Digging into WARCs
Location: BG2 0.02
14:00
Digging into the WARCs: Hands-on With the Archives Unleashed Toolkit (abstract)
14:00-17:30 Session 3B: Future Historians of the Internet
Location: BG2 0.12
14:00
Future Historians of the Internet: A Speculative Workshop (abstract)
Wednesday, June 19th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

09:30-10:00 Session 5: Welcome to The Web that Was

Welcome message by Prof. dr. Richard Rogers, chair of New Media & Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

10:00-11:00 Session 6: Keynote: Olia Lialina

Prof. Olia Lialina (Merz Akademie)

Collections

On the photo that accompanies this abstract you see me posing with my collection of early web manuals. Each of the books in turn contains its author’s collection of links to good or useful websites, many of which were collections themselves: of graphics, sounds, code, scripts and further URLs, where somebody else has already found what you were looking for. Collections were a cornerstone of the vernacular web. This environment was more about spirit than about skills, and to accumulate and distribute was no less important than to create. Making your own site and building collections was often a parallel process. Because of the modular structure of web pages, even sites that never contained a collection section were, in themselves, collections, since each of their elements had its own URL and could easily be singled out and extracted. Still, some web masters made collecting the main purpose of their web site.

This talk will highlight the earliest known collections: Alan and Lucy Richmond Graphic Resources, Randy’s Icon Bazaar, the first Gallery of pureGIF animations started by Royal Frazier, Netscape’s animated GIFs, and BHI graphics. I address the role of these and other collections, and the subsequent transition from collections of items to sample pages, sets, and templates. Let’s wander through Sonya Marvel Creations, Mardi Wetmore’s Graphics on Budget, Moon and Back sets; look at the heritage left by GeoBuilder, Intel’s Web Page Wizard, Front Page, Yahoo Page Builder, and their templates. The GeoCities Research Institute archive and library provide quite some evidence to understand the logic, structure, and evolution of materials and tools available to web amateurs of the medium’s first decade. However, most of the time we deal with fragments, splinters, and web masters’ voluntarism. Creating our own collections helps to complete the picture.

 

11:00-11:30Coffee Break
11:30-12:45 Session 7A: Digital Art
Location: OMHP C0.23 (26)
11:30
Rogue sites, how Netart sneaked into the museum (abstract)
11:50
Platform curating: A brief history of networked strategies and their entanglement with web technology (abstract)
12:10
Preservation of Net Art through ‘Networks of Care’: A round-robin conversation about its challenges and benefits (abstract)
11:30-12:45 Session 7B: Staying Power
11:30
A Place to Rest: BBS Communities and the Early Web (abstract)
11:50
Missing the Old YouTube: Collective Nostalgia for Platforms Past (abstract)
12:10
Craigslist and platform politics of the 1990s (abstract)
11:30-12:45 Session 7C: Archived (National) Webs
11:30
Unearthing the Belgian web of the 1990’s: a digitised reconstruction (abstract)
11:50
Digging into Big Web Archive Data: The Development of the Danish Web 2006- 2015 (abstract)
12:10
Giving with one hand, taking with the other: e-legal deposit, web archives and researcher access (abstract)
11:30-12:45 Session 7D: Platform and App Histories 1
11:30
Where did that #snapstory and #instastory go? The role of YouTube as a cultural archive of ephemeral social interactions (abstract)
11:50
On the preservation of apps and app data (abstract)
12:10
Remember Vine? The Web Vernacular Between Remembrance and Preservation (abstract)
12:45-14:00Lunch break

Brown bag lunches will be available in the Allard Pierson Museum Café (Google Maps link). There is limited seating in the café itself, but plenty of nice outdoor spaces in the surrounding area.

14:00-15:15 Session 8B: New Archives, New Histories?
14:00
Occupying the Archive: Implications of the digital revolution for historical research (abstract)
14:20
Screens in struggles. Memories of social movements on French Web-TV since the late 1990s (abstract)
14:40
“‘Healthy people have bad days, too’: Narratives of AIDS and HIV on GeoCities” (abstract)
14:00-15:15 Session 8C: The Commercial Internet
14:00
Infomaré and Superinfovia; the sea and the highway: Brazilian imagination and the early commercial internet (abstract)
14:20
‘This is not how we imagined it’: Technological Affordances, Economic Drivers and the Internet Architecture Imaginary (abstract)
14:40
Governing the Commercial Internet: Multistakeholder Influences on Clinton Era Governance of the Global Internet (abstract)
14:00-15:15 Session 8D: Researcher Access and Support
14:00
Lowering the Barrier to Access: The Archives Unleashed Cloud Project (abstract)
14:20
Supporting Computational Research on Historical Web Collections (abstract)
15:30-16:45 Session 9A: Imaginaries
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
15:30
Digital Utopianism and Network Music: The Rise and Fall of the Res Rocket Surfer band (abstract)
15:50
Bugs: viral thinking in the early internet (abstract)
16:10
The Evolution of Parafictions in Contemporary Media Art 1998-2018 (abstract)
15:30-16:45 Session 9B: Digging/Archaeology 1
Location: OMHP C0.17 (84)
15:30
Public personal documents: tracing trajectories of the first Polish bloggers’ digital identities (abstract)
15:50
The Misconstrual of Block Quotation: A Web Stratigraphy (abstract)
16:10
‘The web is not print’: tracing historical influences on changing web coding practices (abstract)
15:30-16:45 Session 9D: Archives and Migrant Communities
Location: OMHP C0.23 (26)
15:30
Analysing and archiving the web presence of migrant communities in the web archives of the Netherlands and the UK (abstract)
17:00-18:15 Session 10: Keynote: Fred Turner

Prof. Fred Turner (Stanford University)

Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism

In 1989, as Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up the World Wide Web, a deep faith in the democratizing power of decentralized communication ruled American life. Even Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator of the Hollywood era, could be heard to proclaim that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the micro-chip.” Today of course, we know better. The question is, how did we go so far wrong? To try to answer that question, this talk returns to the 1940s and shows how our trust in decentralized communication was born in the fight against fascism during World War II. It then tracks that trust through the counterculture of the 1960s to the Silicon Valley of today. Along the way, it shows step-by-step how the twentieth-century American dream of a society of technology-equipped, expressive individuals became the foundation of today’s newly emboldened and highly individualized form of authoritarianism.

Thursday, June 20th

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

09:30-10:45 Session 11A: National Networks
Location: OMHP C2.17 (48)
09:30
The parable of IPerBOLE, the first Italian civic network (1993-1997) (abstract)
09:50
"The Web as my Friend":Social history of BBS and BBS culture in Chinese netizens' memory (abstract)
10:10
Internetworking Europe: Euronet and the rise and demise of a Europe-Wide-Web (1971-1993) (abstract)
09:30-10:45 Session 11B: Shock, Meme, Desire
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
09:30
Discordant principles: memes, memetics, and epistemological disruption (abstract)
09:50
Operationalizing (un)desirability: What Images Want? (abstract)
10:10
The Legacy of the Shock Site: Abject Images After Rotten.com (abstract)
09:30-10:45 Session 11C: Material Semiotics
09:30
Windows, mirrors and prisms: Tracing interactive design from usability to UX (abstract)
09:50
Into the Unknown – the age of the uncharted web, the sitemap and the advent of search. A reflection on the beauty of navigation before the integrated search (abstract)
10:10
MORAL MAGIC COOKIES (abstract)
09:30-10:45 Session 11D: Building and Maintaining Archives
09:30
Web Data Engineering: A Technical Perspective on Web Archives (abstract)
09:50
Memento Tracer - An Innovative Approach Towards Balancing Scale and Fidelity for Web Archiving (abstract)
10:10
Arquivo.pt: a free open-access service to research the past Web (abstract)
11:00-11:30Coffee Break
11:30-12:45 Session 12A: Networked Cultural Production
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
11:30
“We didn’t really get the internet”: The early history of Hungarian digital media and online journalism (abstract)
11:50
Net Art and the Performance of Images (abstract)
12:10
Networks of Sound: PLATO, Electronic Music and the Networked Construction of Computer Music (abstract)
11:30-12:45 Session 12C: Platform and App Histories 2
11:30
Geotagged Tweets: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (abstract)
11:50
Platform historiography: Materials for platform and app histories (abstract)
12:10
Tracing key moments on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine: An argument for app archives (abstract)
11:30-12:45 Session 12D: Digging/Archaeology 2
11:30
Scoops and brushes for web archaeology: Metadata dating (abstract)
11:50
Using web archives to study web tracking: Tracking technologies on the Danish web from 2006 to 2015 (abstract)
12:10
The language of “sharing” on Chinese social media: A historical and cultural analysis (abstract)
12:45-14:00Lunch break

Brown bag lunches will be available in the Allard Pierson Museum Café (Google Maps link). There is limited seating in the café itself, but plenty of nice outdoor spaces in the surrounding area. 

From 13:30-13:50, Lionel Broye and Marie Molins will demo their Minitel installation 3615 LOVE at the conference exhibition in BG2 (Google maps link). Space is limited, so please arrive early and follow the instructions of conference volunteers.

14:00-14:45 Session 13A: On Repeat
Location: OMHP C0.23 (26)
14:00
The Web Now (abstract)
14:20
Listening to the rhythm of the web – Examining the web’s history through sonic epistemologies (abstract)
14:00-14:45 Session 13B: Infrastructure and Sociability
Chair:
Location: OMHP C2.17 (48)
14:00
Never-ending inbox: a comparative study of media arts mailinglists (abstract)
14:20
COMMUNITIES AT A CROSSROADS. Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture (abstract)
14:00-14:45 Session 13C: Digital Activism
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
14:00
Histories of digital activism - narrative formation in historical accounts and references to digital activism (abstract)
14:20
Taking to the digital streets: A case study of hacktivism on the early web (abstract)
14:00-14:45 Session 13D: Don't be Eviler
Location: OMHP C0.17 (84)
14:00
The changing face of Facebook. Confessions of former Facebook employees (abstract)
14:20
The Land Before Time: Yahoo’s Acquisition of GeoCities in 1999 (abstract)
15:00-16:30 Session 14: Keynote: Wendy Chun

Prof. Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)

Exit: The Web that Remains

This talk questions nostalgia regarding the web that was by tracing the links between 1990s visions of "cyberspace" and today's embrace of AI. Both seek to solve political problems technologically through promises of an impossibly autonomous sovereignty.

Respondent: Florian Cramer (Willem de Kooning Academy)

17:15-21:00Conference Reception

Please arrive at Mediamatic on time for our special event from 17:30-18:45.

Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures) and guests

A History of the media arts content provider Desk.nl

Geert Lovink and guests will, for the first time, dig into the history of internet content provider for the arts desk.nl, which launched late 1994 to provide a workspace and internet access for Amsterdam’s burgeoning net culture and hosted early projects such as Rhizome, nettime and net.artists including Jodi.

The special event will be followed by a vegan buffet dinner.

Friday, June 21st

View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview

10:00-11:15 Session 15A: Past Futures
Location: OMHP C0.23 (26)
10:00
The social life of the posthuman: transhumanist communities and online future-making (abstract)
10:20
The web that wasn’t: a digital library lens on past futures of the internet (abstract)
10:40
Smart machines, ubiquitous computing, and the future that keeps coming back (abstract)
10:00-11:15 Session 15B: Digital Migration and the Egyptian Net
Location: OMHP C2.17 (48)
10:00
On Digital Migration and the Politics of Disguise: Writing the contemporary histories of Egyptian Internet Culture (abstract)
10:00-11:15 Session 15C: Identity
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
10:00
‘Coming Out’ in Éire: exploring methodologies for finding and recording internet and web histories of the LGBT movement in Ireland (abstract)
10:20
MyKnet.org: The Cultural History and Social Life of an Indigenous Web-Based Environment (abstract)
10:40
China's Provincial Internet (abstract)
10:00-11:15 Session 15D: Vernacular Creativity
Location: OMHP C0.17 (84)
10:00
“I’m singing with my laptop, making up new songs”: Automated music-making and vernacular appropriation in the moment that was, and future that wasn’t, of Microsoft Songsmith (abstract)
10:20
“MySpace Had Us All Coding”: A Nostalgic (Re)imagining of ‘Web 2.0’ (abstract)
10:40
Years of the Internet: Vernacular creativity before, on and after the Chinese Web (abstract)
11:15-11:45Coffee Break
11:45-12:45 Session 16: Keynote: Megan Sapnar Ankerson

Dr. Megan Sapnar Ankerson (University of Michigan)

Zombies, Robots and Time Machines: Improbable Histories of the World Wide Web

What is “the web that was”? In important ways, the question is an invitation to reimagine what it means to do web history and think historically about networked algorithmically-generated records more broadly. Born-digital archives encountered through platforms like the Wayback Machine and Google Streetview are important objects to think with about the epistemologies, temporalities, and lived experiences of a digitally networked archived life: they are material-semiotic sites through which we encounter history anew. While the “material turn” has inspired research into the infrastructural, algorithmic and programmable aspects of digital platforms, surging interest in materiality has come at the expense of critical attention to the semiotic dimensions of sociotechnical systems. This talk therefore turns to the “tropic” role of language in order to probe the tensions and contradictions that trouble categories of truth, knowledge and evidence in the digital era. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s famous figure of the cyborg in modern technoscience, I turn to three figures that can be found lurking in the technical documentation of web archives: zombies, robots, and time machines. These figures emerge in these documents not for fictional or dramatic purposes, but as a way to help explain the uncanny temporalities encountered in the process of archiving the “live web.” More than just colorful metaphors that infuse geek culture, I approach these figurations as material-semiotic nodes that register interference patterns in the archival epistemologies of modernity. Zombies, robots and time machines trouble distinctions between past and future, archived and live, automated and human, and in doing, they direct us towards the political work and queer potential of grappling with “improbable artifacts,” historical records that challenge the categories and schemas put in place in the creation of modern archival systems and principles in the 19th century. Recognizing the queer potential of web archives, I suggest, is an opportunity to harness different perspectives on “what was” and what “will be” in order to read against the grain of algorithmic logics of probability and prediction.

 

12:45-14:00Lunch break

Brown bag lunches will be available in the Allard Pierson Museum Café (Google Maps link). There is limited seating in the café itself, but plenty of nice outdoor spaces in the surrounding area. 

From 13:30-13:50, come and join Robert Jansma for a walk through Digital Amsterdam of 1998. De Digitale Stad was a BBS and then a website that pioneered internet use in the Netherlands. We will be looking at a replica based on the FREEZE, a backup made during the two year anniversary of DDS. To join this session, go and head to the conference exhibition in BG2 (Google maps link). Space is limited, so please arrive early and follow the instructions of conference volunteers.

14:00-15:15 Session 17A: Countercultures and Counterhistory
Location: OMHP C1.17 (48)
14:00
Nurturing the Nodes: Early Carework for Future Hubs of Computational Culture (abstract)
14:20
Responsible Computing Before the Web (abstract)
14:40
What can the World Wide Web learn from the Wood Wide Web? (abstract)
14:00-15:15 Session 17B: Territories and Topologies
Location: OMHP C2.17 (48)
14:00
Territories and Topologies of the Early Web: Internet Cafés, Cyber Geographies, APIs, and Graph Topologies (abstract)
14:00-15:15 Session 17C: Constructing Archives Together
Location: OMHP C0.23 (26)
14:00
Finding traces in YouTube’s non-archival archive (abstract)
14:30
Participatory Web Archiving: Opening the Black Box of SavePageNow (abstract)
14:50
Forensically Reconstructing Non-Institutional Archival Practices in Timothy Leary’s Digital Archives (1989-1996) (abstract)
14:00-15:15 Session 17D: Rethinking the Web and the Archive
Location: OMHP C0.17 (84)
14:00
The Objecthood of Web Archives (abstract)
14:20
The new forms of the archive in digital culture (is it still an archive?) (abstract)
14:40
Archives, Web fragments and diasporas : for a disaggregated exploration of web archives related to online representations of diasporas (abstract)
15:30-16:45 Session 18: Closing Panel

Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia), Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo), Valérie Schafer (University of Luxemburg), Jane Winters (University of London) 

Panel members will lead a discussion of key issues raised during the conference and reflect on future directions for the field.

16:45-17:15 Session 19: Closing remarks and the future of RESAW with Niels Brügger

Prof. Niels Brügger (Aarhus University) will lead a closing session and discuss the future of RESAW including upcoming conferences.