Don’t try to be original! Web archives as ‘reborn digital sources’

Web archives as “born digital” source collections come with multiple biases, both concerning the archived web pages and web sites themselves, the web collections (notably those created on precise events, like Paris terrorist attacks and the COVID-crisis), and the metadata. After explaining why web archives must be considered as a “reborn digital heritage” (Brügger,2016) and the multi-layered socio-technical transformations and mediations that are inherent to the archiving of the Web, the presentation will focus on scholary strategies to face such uncertainties, including best practices in documentation, scalable reading, and online source criticism.