Web Archives and the Postmodern Turn: Curators, Participation and Representation
Abstract
This article examines born-web and archived sources as future historical source corpora, with particular attention to the ways in which they are shaped by technical infrastructures, institutional collecting strategies, curatorial decisions, and forms of community participation. It argues that web archives should not be understood as neutral digital continuations of traditional source collections: their gaps, imbalances, and representational distortions are influenced by the fragmentary nature of the live web, platformization, digital divides, legal and technical constraints, and the selective logic of archiving. The article surveys institutional and boundary-positioned actors in web archiving, then discusses degrees of participatory archiving, from crowdsourcing to community control. It argues that archival openness and community participation do not in themselves guarantee more just or representative collections, but raise new ethical, professional, and source-critical questions. Web archives can thus be understood as practical sites of postmodern archival theory: they make visible the constructed nature of preservation and redefine the responsibilities of curators, institutions, and communities in shaping digital memory.
Keywords:
web archives, participatory archiving, representation, curatorial responsibility, postmodern archival theoryCitation data from Crossref
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