49 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still exist, the first mass printed book in 1452, no copies of the first website exists.
When Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1991 he didn't save an original copy of the first website ever published, instead he kept saving over the document as he made changes to it for months, thus no copy of this culturally significant artefact remains.
The same is true for many websites that are responsible for how the Web now looks and functions.
We believe that these pieces of cultural history are as important as the first books printed and therefore set up Digital Archaeology, an initiative to preserve culturally significant pieces of digital culture and raise awareness of digital archiving.
Its main focus being an exhibition where we showcase these restored websites on the software and hardware of the time, because we believe it's all about context, amongst the collection of sites we have the earliest version of Tim Berners-Lee's first website available, showcased on a NeXT cube using the NeXTstep operating system, the first web browser which Tim Berners-Lee also created as web browsers of course didn't exist.
The first exhibition was held in London as part of Internet Week Europe 2010.
In 2011, Digital Archaeology attracted more than 12,000 visitors at Internet Week New York, gaining sponsorship from Google and with a keynote presentation by The Library of Congress.
I co-curated a capsule version of the show, focusing on the work of influential agencies based in East London, was put on as part of Digital Shoreditch 2013. The exhibition was visited by a team from CERN responsible for restoring the first website and documenting early browsing experiences.
Digital Archaeology features as a key part of a larger exhibition, called Digital Revolution that debuted at The Barbican in 2014 and is now travelling world wide.
The exhibition has been covered by the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Wall Street Journal, the New Scientist, Wired, Fox News, Reuters, CNN, NPR, Fast Company, Time Out, ReadWriteWeb, the Next Web and around 300 other news organisations. It was shortlisted for a 2012 Digital Preservation Award by the Digital Preservation Coalition.
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