CfP: Internet histories and computational methods

Special issue of Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (editors of special issue: Niels Brügger & Ian Milligan) Argument The internet is a born-digital medium, but for a number of years many histories of the internet have used traditional non-computational methods such as document analysis and interviews. However, recent studies of the archived web have benefited from the born-digital nature of the Web and have fruitfully used computational methods to explore the internet’s past. Although the use of computational methods is not necessary just because the object of study itself is digital, with this special issue of Internet Histories we would like to map and present some of the possibilities and challenges related to the use of computational methods within historical studies of the internet and the web. We welcome articles about any use of computers to study the internet's history, from computational methods used to study digitized documents such as scanned documents and other similar sources to established and emerging computational methods used to study the internet itself, from email lists to USENET archives to the archived web and beyond. Articles can be either theoretical, methodological or can explore the findings of studies. Topics can include, but are not limited to: · document studies using text mining or similar computational techniques; · studies using network analysis, image analysis or similar digital methods; · the importance of collecting and preserving digital sources and the interface between collections and computational methods; · the historical development of computational methods and tools; · approaches to develop infrastructure to enable the study of born-digital documents; · commercial vs. academic approaches to computational methods; · computational methods used to study email lists, web archives, social media, and more; · the interplay between internet histories and digital humanities; · the use of social media as a historical source; · surprise us! — computational methods may have been used to write histories of the internet in ways we could not even imagine... Submissions We ask for abstracts of a maximum of 700 words to be emailed to Niels Brügger (nb@cc.au.dk) and Ian Milligan (i2millig@uwaterloo.ca) no later than 7 December 2018. Authors of accepted abstracts are invited to submit an article, and notification about acceptance will be sent by 23 December 2018. Please note that acceptance of abstract does not imply final publication as all articles have to go through the journal's usual review process. Time schedule · 7 Dec 2018: due date for abstracts · 23 December: notification of acceptance · April 2019: accepted articles to be submitted · May-July: review process and revisions More information on Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Societycan be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rint20