The changing digital faces of science museums: diachronic analysis of museum websites

In recent years, web history (Brügger, 2010) has started to receive substantial attention in internet studies and digital humanities, and its theories and methods have been applied to political science research (e.g. Foot et al., 2003; Ben David, 2015) as well as cultural and social history (e.g. Milligan 2015). Inspired by this academic development, this chapter is intended to be a starting point to discuss how prominent scientific institutions develop their websites over a period of time to communicate better with their visitors. More specifically, this work presents the formulation of a methodology for using websites as primary sources to trace and examine activities of scientific institutions through the years. This is achieved in three steps: first, we diachronically analyse snapshots of pages of select museum websites from the Internet Archive, the most important and comprehensive web archive (Howell, 2006). Then, we combine this analysis with interviews of the current website managers and with resources available on the live web.