“Alle Begjin Is Swier": The Use Of The Frisian Web Domain Web Data For Digital Humanities Research

We have seen an steep growth in the amount of general Top Level Domains outside the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allowed the introduction of new generic top-level domains on June 26, 2008. The most interesting generic TLD from the point of web archiving in the Netherlands was the introduction of the Frisian top-level domain .frl in 2014. Fryslân (Friesland in Dutch) is a region of the Netherlands with its own minority language and culture. Around 354,000 people have the Frisian language as their native language. Since 2014, no less than 14,000 URL’s have been registered with this domain extension, of which 60% is a website. Many of these websites have Frisian language content on it.
This poster will describe the plans, the preliminary results and the research potential of The Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of the Netherlands (KB-NL) to map, harvest and create a web data set out of the Frisian web domain starting with the .frl TLD. KB-NL as a national library has collected born digital material from the web since 2007 through web archiving. It makes a selection of websites with cultural and academic content from the Dutch national web. Most of the sites were harvested because of their value as cultural heritage of the Netherlands, including the Frisian heritage and culture. KB-NL works together with Tresoar, the repository of the history of Fryslân, to select and harvest born digital content of the Frisian web for its web archive.
I will describe the methods and experience with mapping, selecting and harvesting websites of the Frisian web domain. I discuss also the characteristics of web materials and archived web materials and will explain the use of these various materials (harvested websites, link clouds, context information) for digital humanities research. A future harvest of the Frisian web domain will provide future researchers with an unique born digital data set of a minority language which can be combined with other similar data sets of the Frisian language.

Bibliography

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Teszelszky, K. (2018). The historic context of web archiving and the web archive: reconstructing and saving the Dutch national web using historical methods. In: The historical web and Digital Humanities: The case of national web domains. Brügger, N. and Laursen, D. (eds) London: Routledge, pp. 13-29.