In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material in the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan’s Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.

Historians make research queries on Google, ProQuest, and the HathiTrust. They garner information from keyword searches, carried out across millions of documents, their research shaped by algorithms they rarely understand. Historians often then visit archives in whirlwind trips marked by thousands of digital photographs, subsequently explored on computer monitors from the comfort of their offices. They may then take to social media or other digital platforms, their work shaped through these new forms of pre- and post-publication review. Almost all aspects of the historian’s research workflow have been transformed by digital technology. In other words, all historians – not just Digital Historians – are implicated in this shift. The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age equips historians to be self-conscious practitioners by making these shifts explicit and exploring their long-term impact. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Believe it or not, the 1990s are history. As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive have been collecting for the past three decades.

The SAGE Handbook of Web History marks the first comprehensive review of this subject to date. Its editors emphasise the two different forms of its study: the use of the web as an historical resource, and the web as an object of study in its own right. Bringing together all the existing knowledge of the field, with an interdisciplinary focus and an international scope, this is an incomparable resource for historians and students alike.

The Digital Humanities have flourished at a moment when digital big data is becoming easily available. Yet there is a gap in the scholarly literature on the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for both research and in our teaching and learning. We are on the cusp of needing to grasp big data approaches to do our work, whether it’s understanding the underlying algorithms at work in our search engines, or needing to design and use our own tools to process comparatively large amounts of information. This book fills that gap, and in its live-writing approach, will set the direction for the conversation into the future.