权益分类	功能权益	普通用户	{{item.name}}会员
{{category.name}}	{{benefitItem.name}}

Historicizing the dot.com bubble and contextualizing email archives

互联网泡沫的历史化和电子邮件档案的背景化

基本信息

批准号：
AH/T013060/1
负责人：
Stephanie Decker
金额：
$ 10.24万
依托单位：
University of Bristol
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2020
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2020 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FT013060%2F1
关键词：
Historicizing dot.com bubble contextualizing email

项目摘要

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.

未来的研究人员如果要了解那些生活在20世纪末和21世纪初的人的生活，就必须接触电子邮件。对于组织和他们的员工来说尤其如此，对于他们来说，电子邮件已经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非常罕见，而且很少有人把它们作为一种历史资源来使用。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备受瞩目的法律诉讼，自发布以来几乎没有进行过历史调查。虽然这部分是由于其相对较近，但将电子邮件作为历史来源阅读是一种发展中的实践，需要传统上与历史调查无关的特殊技能和知识。尽管如此，档案馆和其他遗产组织越来越多地收集和保存电子邮件数据，我们正迅速进入一个对20世纪90年代的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的需求之间的差距，未来的需求将允许他们真正被阅读和参与。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易于访问，以实现历史学习和研究的目的。我们在这里关注的问题是，虽然电子邮件为研究人员提供了宝贵的见解，但对于那些希望理解其内容、相互关系和更广泛的历史意义的人来说，缺乏背景往往是一个挑战。对于训练有素的历史学家和普通用户来说，这种去语境化可能是参与的障碍。此外，现有的电子邮件档案通常会有意删除个人信息，进一步切断电子邮件与作者、收件人的联系，以及与相关材料的联系。由于这些原因，我们的项目将以维护电子邮件所拥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它们与前面和后面的电子邮件的连接来理解单个电子邮件。此外，我们将把历史背景带回到非语境化的数据中，使研究人员能够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。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，该项目将专注于从dot.com时代的一家失败的美国软件公司获取并重新构建一个电子邮件存档的工作示例，使其以各种形式提供，以满足潜在读者的不同需求。更具体地说，项目有三个整体的工作包，它们一起交付项目的目的和目标。该项目的第一个方面围绕着将档案中的组成电子邮件链接在一起以保留通信的基本网络结构的工作，并根据其内容与其他断开的电子邮件建立关系链接。这将与一个允许搜索和读取整个存档的用户界面相结合。该项目的第二个方面是根据其档案对这家失败的美国公司进行历史案例研究，并将需要开发对其历史的叙事解释和公众参与的在线平台。最后一个包侧重于项目的遗产，并处理档案的长期保存、最佳实践的描述以及与项目涉众的接触等问题。