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2025COM010
Doctoral thesis

Exploring the “Web as a Whole” with CERN archive : an STS analysis on web history

  • 2025

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Web
Internet
Networking
Science and technology studies
Digital methods
Social construction of technology
Actor-network theory
English This research advances the field of Web History by analyzing newly accessible materials from The World Wide Web (WWW) Archives at CERN. Through three papers that retrace missing histories, this research addresses current historiographical debates by challenging the teleological and mythological dimension of the dominant narratives of networking development. Drawing from the elaboration of classical Science and Technology Studies approaches (STS) and by applying qualitative methods, this research investigates: 1) The development of the collection. 2) The role of advertising for alternative hypertext systems collected by the two main founding fathers of the Web. 3) Media interpretations that have generated controversies among social groups. The research includes digital methods used to triangulate the WWW collection and obtain complementary data. The born digital archives considered are the WWW-Talk mailing lists and the World Wide Web Consortium Historical Archive.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
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Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1332531
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