Tuesday 9 October 2018 – Peter Webster – The contemporary religious history of the Web: themes, prospects and pitfalls

This seminar is 5:15 pm – 6:15 pm, 9 October 2018, in Room 203 (the John S Cohen Room), second floor, Institute of Historical Research. The IHR is in the North block of Senate House, University of London. Find Senate House on Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU. It will also be livestreamed.

Session chair: Richard Deswarte

The emerging discipline of Web history is at a point of inflection. Over nearly ten years, a small but worldwide community of scholars has been grappling with the methodological questions raised by the Web, and the archived Web in particular, as scholarly sources. (Some of this exploration has been aired in this seminar in previous years.) At the same time, the continuously moving frontier that marks the further extent of the interest of contemporary historians has now reached the 1990s, the period during which the Web begins to take its place as a truly revolutionary medium of communication. This paper sets out to connect the preoccupations of contemporary religious history with the developing area of Web history, and to suggest an agenda for the near future of the contemporary religious history of the Web.

 

Dr Peter Webster is an independent scholar and consultant. He has published widely both on contemporary British religious history, on the history of online religion and on web archives as scholarly sources. This paper draws on imminently forthcoming work in the Sage Handbook of Web History, and elsewhere. He is to be found online at peterwebster.me or @pj_webster on Twitter.