Historicizing the dot.com bubble and contextualizing email archives

如果未来的研究人员想要了解那些生活在20世纪末21世纪初的人的生活，他们将不得不使用电子邮件。对于组织及其员工来说尤其如此，对他们来说，电子邮件已成为内部和外部沟通的默认形式。就目前的情况而言，公开的电子邮件档案很少，作为历史资源与之接触的也很少。事实上，最著名的例子之一，安然电子邮件语料库，之所以存在，只是因为该公司破产后的高调法律程序，而且自它发布以来，历史调查一直很少。虽然这在一定程度上是由于其相对较近的时间，但将电子邮件作为历史来源阅读是一种不断发展的做法，需要特殊的技能和知识，而这些技能和知识传统上与历史调查无关。尽管如此，档案馆和其他遗产组织正在越来越多地收集和保存电子邮件数据，我们正在迅速进入1990年代事件具有历史意义的时期。我们相信，我们的项目提供了一个及时的机会来解决当前保存电子邮件的努力与未来允许电子邮件被阅读和参与的要求之间的差距。为了解决这个问题，我们寻求更好地理解如何使电子邮件档案更容易获得，以用于历史学习和研究。我们在这里关注的问题是，尽管电子邮件为研究人员提供了宝贵的见解，但缺乏背景往往会对那些希望了解电子邮件的内容、相互关系和更广泛的历史意义的人构成挑战。这种去情境化对训练有素的历史学家和普通兴趣用户来说都可能是参与的障碍。此外，现有的电子邮件存档示例经常故意删除个人信息，进一步切断电子邮件与其作者、收件人的联系以及与相关材料的联系。出于这些原因，我们的项目将以维护电子邮件所具有的关系和网络属性的方式提供电子邮件存档，因为这些属性允许根据单个电子邮件与之前和之后的电子邮件的联系来理解它们。此外，我们将把历史背景带回原本去语境化的数据，允许研究人员以一种欣赏更广泛的历史环境的方式来解释孤立的交流项目，这些项目是在更广泛的历史环境中产生的。我们将通过三所大学(布里斯托尔大学、德蒙福特大学、马里兰大学)和两个遗产部门合作伙伴(英国国家档案馆和美国哈格利博物馆和图书馆)之间的英美合作来应对这一挑战。通过这些合作，该项目将专注于访问和重新设置来自网络时代一家失败的美国软件公司的电子邮件档案的工作示例，使其以各种形式提供，以满足其潜在读者的不同需求。更具体地说，该项目有三个总体工作包，它们共同交付了项目的目的和目标。该项目的第一个方面是将档案中的组成电子邮件连接在一起，以保留通信的基本网络结构，并根据电子邮件的内容建立与其他方面断开连接的电子邮件的关系链接。这将与一个允许搜索和读取整个档案的用户界面相结合。该项目的第二个方面是以这家破产的美国公司的档案为基础，提供一个历史案例研究，它将需要开发一个对其历史的叙述性解释，并建立一个公众参与的在线平台。最后一套方案侧重于该项目的遗产，涉及档案的长期保存、最佳做法的说明以及与项目利益攸关方的接触等问题。

Future researchers will have to engage with emails if they are to understand the lives of those who lived in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is particularly true of organizations and their employees, for whom email has become the default form of internal and external communication. As it currently stands, publicly available email archives are rare, and there has been minimal engagement with them as a historical resource. Indeed, one of the most well-known examples, the Enron Email Corpus, only exists because of high-profile legal proceedings that followed the firm's bankruptcy and has seen minimal historical investigation since its publication. While this is partly due to its comparative recency, the reading of emails as a historical source is a developing practice and requires particular skills and knowledge that are not traditionally associated with historical enquiry. Despite this, archives and other heritage organizations are increasingly collecting and preserving email data and we are fast moving into the period where the events of the 1990s are of historical interest. We believe that our project offers a timely opportunity to address the gap between current efforts to preserve email and the future requirements that will allow them to actually be read and engaged with. To address this issue, we seek a better understanding of how email archives can be made more accessible for the purposes of historical learning and research. The problem we focus on here is that, while emails offer valuable insight to researchers, a lack of context often presents a challenge to those wishing to understand their content, inter-relationship and wider historical significance. This de-contextualization can represent a barrier to engagement, to both trained historians and general interest users. Furthermore, existing examples of email archives often purposefully remove personal information, further disconnecting emails from their authors, recipients and connection to related material. For these reasons, our project will make an email archive available in such a way that maintains the relational and network properties that emails hold, as these allow individual emails to be understood in terms of their connection to those that precede and follow them. Furthermore, we will bring the historical context back to otherwise de-contextualized data, allowing researchers to interpret isolated items of communication in a way that appreciates the wider historical circumstances in which they were created. We will address this challenge through a UK-US collaboration between three universities (University of Bristol, De Montfort University, University of Maryland) and two heritage sector partners (The National Archives, UK, and Hagley Museum and Library, US). Through these collaborations, the project will focus on accessioning and re-contextualizing a worked example of an email archive from a failed US software company from the dot.com era, making it available in various forms to suit the diverse requirements of its potential readers. More specifically, the project has three overall work packages that together deliver on the project's aim and objectives. The first aspect of the project centres around work linking the constituent emails in the archive together to retain the basic network structure of the communications and making relational links to otherwise disconnected emails based on their content. This will be combined with a user interface that allows the whole archive to be searched and read. The second aspect of the project provides a historical case study of the failed US company based on its archive and will require the development of both a narrative explanation of its history and an online platform for public engagement with it. The final package focuses on the project's legacy and deals with issues of long-term preservation of the archive, description of best practice, and engagement with project stakeholders.