Slides for a paper given at the ReSAW conference 'Web Archives as Scholarly Sources', Aarhus (Denmark), June 2015

1. Reading creationism in the web
archive: a utopian dream, a
conspiracy theory and a moral
panic
Peter Webster
Webster Research and Consulting
@pj_webster

2. Creationism ?
• non-evolutionary account of human
origins
• modern
• a long history
• a feature of some parts of evangelicalism
• (anti-evolutionism, Intelligent Design)

3. Three questions
A justified conspiracy theory about
marginalisation of creationist voices?
A real danger or a moral panic (Truth in
Science) ?
The web as friend of the marginalised
opinion?

4. Data: UK Host Link
Graph (1996-2010)
1996 | appserver.ed.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1
1996 | art-www.acorn.co.uk | portico.bl.uk 1
1996 | astra.ich.ucl.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1
1996 | back.niss.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1
1996 | beta.bids.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 2
19GB, available at: http://tinyurl.com/kon2eve

5. Approach
• selection of key UK creationist sites
• extraction of all unique inbound referring
hosts for 1996-2010
• inspection and classification

6. Caveats on method
• partial nature of the dataset
• benchmarking of absolute numbers
• selective sample
• what does a link mean, anyway ?
• not looking at number of linking resources
per host

7. Truth in Science: how
significant?
• only 46 unique inbound hosts
• … of which many were other creationists
or secularist sites
• two churches, one school
• fewer in 2010 than 2007

9. Conclusions
• a utopian dream unfulfilled
• a genuine moral panic
• a justified conspiracy theory?

10. Questions ?
Peter Webster
peter@websterresearchconsulting.com
@pj_webster
peterwebster.me
websterresearchconsulting.com