title: Project "The Digital City Revives" A Case Study of Web Archaeology
creators: Tjarda de Haan
abstract: Twenty-two years ago a city emerged from computers, modems and telephone cables. On 15 January 1994 De Digitale Stad (DDS; The Digital City) opened its virtual gates in Amsterdam. DDS, the first virtual city in the world, and made the internet (free) accessible for the first time to the general public in the Netherlands. But like many other cities in the world history, this city disappeared. In 2001 The Digital City, the website, was taken offline and perished as a virtual Atlantis. Although the digital (r)evolution has reshaped our lives dramatically in the last decades, our digital heritage, and especially the digital memory of the early web, is at risk of being lost. Or worse already gone. Time for the Amsterdam Museum and partners to act and start to safeguard our digital heritage. But, how to excavate The Digital City, a virtual Atlantis, and reconstruct it into a virtual Pompeii? In the case study of web archaeology we will try to answer the questions: how to excavate, reconstruct, present, preserve and sustainably store born-digital heritage and make it accessible to the future generations?