Historicizing the dot.com bubble and contextualizing email archives

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.

The aim of our project is to make born-digital sources better accessible to a broader audience interested in digital transformations. For museums and archives, the digital shift has meant they are faced with growing pressure from increased user expectations. Despite the ubiquity of email within modern communication, there are relatively few email archives accessible to the public. The reasons for this include access issues due to privacy concerns, difficulty in processing, preparing and preserving network-type digital data, and the inherent commercial value of such resources to technology companies for training AI-style applications. These challenges have different implications for our two key stakeholders, heritage professionals and the wider public, which our project seeks to address.

The heritage sector - Through this project, our aim is to enhance the research capacity, knowledge and skills of public and third sector organizations. In this regard, the impact of our project will centre around the increased digital capabilities engendered by our dissemination activities and direct collaboration. Particularly, increased knowledge and skills in how to process emails for optimum researcher engagement will allow holders of such material to make them available or develop strategies for future access where the material is too recent for release. While the project focuses on an organization's email archive, these capabilities will be transferrable to other forms of email corpora, such as those of key public figures. Moreover, they will also hold relevance for newer forms of digital communications such as instant messaging, online forums, and collaborative platforms like Slack and others, which increasingly dominate the public space and organizational life. In addition to skills and resources, the archival interface we develop will have applications beyond the specific archive we apply it to, providing a resource for other heritage institutions to use in searching and reading their own collections. Similarly, the process for creating an online resource for learning will also be made publicly available, informing other interactive exhibits based on email data.

Engaging the wider public in digital history and heritage - As the dot.com boom is nearing its twentieth anniversary, we aim to use digital heritage tools to enhance cultural enrichment, presenting a history of one early software company's rise and fall. While business archives are common and maintain rich and varied material, they are not normally easily accessible to the public. Furthermore, even when collections are publicly available, they are not optimised for public engagement and can easily overwhelm potential users. In providing a basis for increased access to digital historical material in a user-appropriate form, our project will address this barrier, leveraging the rich socio-cultural detail that is embedded within email. We see this impact stemming firstly from the increased researcher-led interest in email archives, allowing email to inform the histories that are written and later engaged with by the public. More directly, the public will be able to interact with email data themselves though our digital exhibit, enriching public understanding of a historical context dominated by email communication (the dot.com boom). That is, emails hold the potential to increase public engagement with research related to societal issues, especially with a relatively recent and well-known historical phenomenon. In this, we will collaborate with our heritage partners' existing public outreach and learning programmes, as well as their established media dissemination strategies.