Special ECREA panel : Rethinking digital sources — making web archives useful for future scholars

The aim of this panel was to draw attention to the large number of archived web collections, and to rethink the challenges and possibilities that they constitute for studies of past and present mediated communication. The point of departure is the international network WARCnet, Web ARChive studies net- work researching web domains and events (warcnet.eu), that is composed of humanities scholars, IT-developers, and web archivists, and that aims at promoting national and transnational research that will help us to understand the history of (trans)national web domains and of transnational events on the web, drawing on the increasingly important digital cultural heritage held in national web archives.