Book Discussion | History in the Age of Abundance: How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research by Ian Milligan
This week, in a course I am taking called History in the Digital Age, we are reading and discussing Ian Milligan’s History in the Age of Abundance: How the Web is Transforming Historical Research (2019). Milligan is a History professor and Associate Vice-President of Research Oversight and Analysis at the University of Waterloo. His primary research centers on how historians and researchers can utilize web archives. In History in the Age of Abundance, Milligan discusses this research, highlighting how web-based data and web archives provide many possibilities for current and future historical research, while at the same time, instigating many ethical challenges, as well as technical ones. Milligan provides a number of case studies in exploring web archives, including the Wayback Machine and GeoCities.
Milligan’s work resonates with me both as an historian who finds value in and has actively used web archives, but also as someone who was around when platforms such as GeoCities existed and as someone who actively used the platform. I can recall being in middle school and using the basic functions of GeoCities to create small personal websites filled with fun GIFs that I found throughout the Internet. And, as I got older and gained more web-building skills, I recall creating websites (both on GeoCities and other platforms such as WordPress) that I can still (partially) access through the Wayback Machine. But until reading Milligan’s work this week, I had never considered the value in being able to access those long forgotten websites outside of occasionally looking at them for a sense of nostalgia. Milligan brings up an apt point in the book, as to what gets archived and what does not, much like a brick-and-mortar archive. Was a personal website of a thirteen year old girl in the early 2000s worth archiving? Maybe, especially if we agree with Milligan and his comparison to other historical projects that have used data from “every day life” to reconstruct what individuals were doing at certain points in history (see page 98). My bias says that these personal sites were and still are important because they are my own personal archives of memories. But again, how do we decide what can be archived? And who gets to decide that?
The questions above also bring me to another point that Milligan discusses in the book, which is who is responsible for preserving these web archives. While there are sources such as the Wayback Machine, as I see firsthand with my childhood sites, it is limited. Not all of the images or pages load, and some of the websites were never archived, both because of algorithms or because of something that Milligan also talks about, the Robots.txt protocol, which actively blocked the archiving of some of the sites. This is both an extremely large question regarding archiving, as well as a technical challenge. Milligan offers some solutions, such as leaving it up to the creator of the web content/data, thinking about the longevity of the project and how it can be preserved in the future. Then again, as we see with the example of Myspace in Milligan’s book- hundreds of thousands of users never felt the need to back up their content and overnight it was lost because the company wanted to do a digital reset (see chapter 2).
In addition to Milligan’s analysis on web archiving, I appreciate how Milligan also provides “how-to’s” in the later chapters. Not only does he provide the historical context and analysis of web archiving, but he provides the reader with ways to explore and analyze web archives with a variety of tools, such as Voyant. For historians and other researchers, these examples of tools one can use encourages the use of web archives as sources and to be used in historical research, which Milligan argues from the beginning of the book.
Discussion Questions
What steps can historians (and other researchers) take to preserve digital content and data? Is it the responsibility of historians (and other researchers) to do this? Why or why not?
Milligan talks not only about those who create web data and web archives, but also discusses who is not creating, for example, those with limited access. How does this affect the research historians (and other researchers) do when using this data? In what ways can historians address this gap while still using the data?
For those that have read Milligan’s book, what ways may you use web data and archives in future research? What tools (including tools Milligan discusses in History in the Age of Abundance) might be useful?
