{"title":"了解ccTLD作为国家网络代理的局限性","authors":"P. Webster","doi":"10.4324/9781315231662-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"National web spheres include content that resides within geographically nonspecific domains, such as .com or .org. However, little is known as to why this content ‘lives’ outside the ccTLD. The island of Ireland is formed of two political units with two ccTLDs (.uk and .ie). This chapter takes the case of the Christian churches in Ireland as a case study in the mapping between the nation and the ccTLD. It investigates the degree to which the differing historic attitudes of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches to national identity are reflected in patterns of domain registration. Based on data for 2015 and 2016, Roman Catholic congregations were more likely to register domains outside the .uk ccTLD. However, there was no corresponding prioritisation of registration within .uk for the several Protestant denominations. That organisations that might be expected to register their web estate within a particular national domain do not in fact do so suggests that the ‘gravitational pull’ of the ccTLD is weak. The chapter also shows that the networks of links between the individual Baptist church congregations on both sides of the border between 1996 and 2010 was both tightly focussed around the churches in Northern Ireland, and also highly localised within one part of the province, whilst being spread across four TLDs. While offline patterns of numeric strength and geographic concentration are reflected online, they map only very loosely onto the ccTLD. Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web: lessons from cross-border religion in the northern Irish web sphere Peter Webster The writing of modern history has often depended on a stable notion of the state. Even if studies of nationalism have dealt subtly with the means by which people understand their relationships with both ethnic nations and the state as a political and legal entity, it has at least been possible to circumscribe the latter without significant difficulty. The world order that has persisted since the early modern period presupposes that persons have some form of citizenship, a legal identification with a state; even if they may hold more than one, each citizenship may stand on its own without legal ambiguity. Another of the fundamental assumptions of that system is that geographical space (at least on land) can usually be clearly divided into territorial units under unified and monopolistic systems of law and government. To elaborate an insight of Max Weber, in order for a state successfully to enforce a monopoly on the use of violence, it must first know where its boundaries are. The high-water mark of national schools of historical writing was perhaps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as compendia of national biographies were created alongside monumental editions of primary sources (examples include the Dictionary of National Biography in the UK, or the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Germany). Scholarly interest has broadened since to include the interactions between states and their peoples across borders, but still by and large supposing a fixity in those states at any one point in time. Studies of migration still must presuppose a point of origin and a point of arrival, both of which are located within physical space. Printed publications may circulate freely, but their publication is still governed by a national legal framework; something similar may be said of television and other broadcast media. The advent of the web presents historians with a new and somewhat perplexing question: where is it? What does it mean to think of the web in spatial and quasi-geographic terms? To what degree may we write national histories of the web? Where did a particular website ‘live’? Of where was it a resident or citizen, so to speak? These questions are explored more fully elsewhere in this volume, but several attempts have already been made, by dint of necessity, to define the parameters of a national web domain. Several nations have legal frameworks of very long standing that provide for the systematic creation of a record of a nation’s publishing, usually known as legal deposit. In extending these to cover non-print publication, which includes the web, it has perforce been necessary to formulate criteria by which to identify web content that falls within the remit of the law. Several such criteria have been adopted, singly or in combination, including the physical location of the server on which the data is hosted, the residence of the person or organisation registering the domain name, and the language in which the content is written (Webster, 2017, 2018b). However, in most cases, the task of defining a national web domain has begun with one or more country code top-level domains (ccTLD) even if it has not ended with them. This chapter examines the nature of the .uk ccTLD as a proxy for the UK web by means of a case study of the web estate of the Christian churches in Northern Ireland. The society of Northern Ireland is marked by an interlinking of religious and national identity, which may be unique in Europe if not, indeed, in the world. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem an unusual case from which to generalise about the nature of national web domains. However, it is through examinations of marginal or exceptional cases such as this that the 1 On the role of national print communities in the development of modern nationalism, see Anderson (1991), pp.37–46. 2 The creation and regulation of ccTLDs is the responsibility of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Registration of individual domains in each ccTLD is delegated to national registrars; in the case of the UK, this is the responsibility of Nominet. ambiguities of the situation are brought into relief. This chapter uses data provided by the British Library to reconstruct the link relationships between churches in Northern Ireland, examining the regional, national, and crossborder relationships that they imply. In doing so, it argues that even though there are indeed clear geographic concentrations in these link graphs, they map only very loosely indeed onto the UK ccTLD. Religion, national identity, and the ccTLD in Northern Ireland The island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920–1921 into the Irish Free State in the south (later the Republic of Ireland) with an overwhelming majority of Roman Catholics, while part of the province of Ulster in the north remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with a Protestant majority population. Although the relative proportions have varied, Northern Ireland always had a significant Roman Catholic minority population. It is not the task of this chapter to recount the history of the ‘Troubles’, the three decades of civil unrest and inter-community violence that were in significant part ended by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998; the literature on the subject is now very large, both on the national and international politics and the local experience, and over very short and very long spans of time (for example, Bew & Patterson, 1985; Howe, 2000). Two decades after the Agreement, it is still the case that many, although by no means all, in the Roman Catholic community identify with the political ideal of a united Ireland, while Protestants tend to retain a strong attachment to the United Kingdom. Within this very particular politico-religious nexus, the Christian churches themselves and their interactions have themselves attracted some historical attention, as their story is both intimately connected with, and distinct from, the wider issue (Ellis, 1992; Gallagher & Worrall, 1982; Power, 2007; Taggart, 2004). It has often been noted that Northern Ireland remains an unusually religious society, when compared to both the rest of the UK and other liberal democracies in the West; Steve Bruce has shown the degree to which the province is an exception to the pattern of secularisation visible elsewhere (Bruce, 2007, pp.53–60). Due to its very particular religious and political history, Northern Irish society has been characterised by an exceptional sensitivity to symbols, to history, and to place. The Northern Ireland Parades Commission was created in 1998 in order to facilitate mediation in the case of disputes concerning the numerous public processions that mark certain key historic dates. Such a procession is the Apprentice Boys March commemorating the ending of the siege in 1689 of the city still known as either Derry or Londonderry according to one’s view of national identity. The decision in 2012 to limit the flying of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall provoked widespread violent unrest in the province (BBC, 2012). The first part of this chapter explores the degree to which that sensitivity to space and symbol has been transferred online. Amongst the churches, Catholic and Protestant, in a province where the symbols of national identity have such prominence, does the location of a website within or outside the .uk domain carry any similar symbolic weight? Might those churches most associated with unionism be more likely to register in the UK ccTLD than Roman Catholic churches? At this point, the scholar bumps up against the fact that researchers know almost nothing of the patterns of registration in individual TLDs. An indication of the scale of the question is given by a 2015 investigation by the British Library, which found more than 2.5 million hosts that were physically located in the UK without having .uk domain names (UK Web Archive, 2015). This would suggest that as much as a third of the UK web may lie outside its ccTLD. There has so far been almost no research that compares this pattern with other national domains, although related 3 In this context, a host is that element of a web domain that may be expressed in the form news.bbc.com. As such, single domains may have many hosts (although not necessarily). In practical terms, host is largely synonymou","PeriodicalId":285640,"journal":{"name":"The Historical Web and Digital Humanities","volume":"132 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2019-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"6","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web\",\"authors\":\"P. Webster\",\"doi\":\"10.4324/9781315231662-8\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"National web spheres include content that resides within geographically nonspecific domains, such as .com or .org. However, little is known as to why this content ‘lives’ outside the ccTLD. The island of Ireland is formed of two political units with two ccTLDs (.uk and .ie). This chapter takes the case of the Christian churches in Ireland as a case study in the mapping between the nation and the ccTLD. It investigates the degree to which the differing historic attitudes of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches to national identity are reflected in patterns of domain registration. Based on data for 2015 and 2016, Roman Catholic congregations were more likely to register domains outside the .uk ccTLD. However, there was no corresponding prioritisation of registration within .uk for the several Protestant denominations. That organisations that might be expected to register their web estate within a particular national domain do not in fact do so suggests that the ‘gravitational pull’ of the ccTLD is weak. The chapter also shows that the networks of links between the individual Baptist church congregations on both sides of the border between 1996 and 2010 was both tightly focussed around the churches in Northern Ireland, and also highly localised within one part of the province, whilst being spread across four TLDs. While offline patterns of numeric strength and geographic concentration are reflected online, they map only very loosely onto the ccTLD. Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web: lessons from cross-border religion in the northern Irish web sphere Peter Webster The writing of modern history has often depended on a stable notion of the state. Even if studies of nationalism have dealt subtly with the means by which people understand their relationships with both ethnic nations and the state as a political and legal entity, it has at least been possible to circumscribe the latter without significant difficulty. The world order that has persisted since the early modern period presupposes that persons have some form of citizenship, a legal identification with a state; even if they may hold more than one, each citizenship may stand on its own without legal ambiguity. Another of the fundamental assumptions of that system is that geographical space (at least on land) can usually be clearly divided into territorial units under unified and monopolistic systems of law and government. To elaborate an insight of Max Weber, in order for a state successfully to enforce a monopoly on the use of violence, it must first know where its boundaries are. The high-water mark of national schools of historical writing was perhaps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as compendia of national biographies were created alongside monumental editions of primary sources (examples include the Dictionary of National Biography in the UK, or the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Germany). Scholarly interest has broadened since to include the interactions between states and their peoples across borders, but still by and large supposing a fixity in those states at any one point in time. Studies of migration still must presuppose a point of origin and a point of arrival, both of which are located within physical space. Printed publications may circulate freely, but their publication is still governed by a national legal framework; something similar may be said of television and other broadcast media. The advent of the web presents historians with a new and somewhat perplexing question: where is it? What does it mean to think of the web in spatial and quasi-geographic terms? To what degree may we write national histories of the web? Where did a particular website ‘live’? Of where was it a resident or citizen, so to speak? These questions are explored more fully elsewhere in this volume, but several attempts have already been made, by dint of necessity, to define the parameters of a national web domain. Several nations have legal frameworks of very long standing that provide for the systematic creation of a record of a nation’s publishing, usually known as legal deposit. In extending these to cover non-print publication, which includes the web, it has perforce been necessary to formulate criteria by which to identify web content that falls within the remit of the law. Several such criteria have been adopted, singly or in combination, including the physical location of the server on which the data is hosted, the residence of the person or organisation registering the domain name, and the language in which the content is written (Webster, 2017, 2018b). However, in most cases, the task of defining a national web domain has begun with one or more country code top-level domains (ccTLD) even if it has not ended with them. This chapter examines the nature of the .uk ccTLD as a proxy for the UK web by means of a case study of the web estate of the Christian churches in Northern Ireland. The society of Northern Ireland is marked by an interlinking of religious and national identity, which may be unique in Europe if not, indeed, in the world. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem an unusual case from which to generalise about the nature of national web domains. However, it is through examinations of marginal or exceptional cases such as this that the 1 On the role of national print communities in the development of modern nationalism, see Anderson (1991), pp.37–46. 2 The creation and regulation of ccTLDs is the responsibility of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Registration of individual domains in each ccTLD is delegated to national registrars; in the case of the UK, this is the responsibility of Nominet. ambiguities of the situation are brought into relief. This chapter uses data provided by the British Library to reconstruct the link relationships between churches in Northern Ireland, examining the regional, national, and crossborder relationships that they imply. In doing so, it argues that even though there are indeed clear geographic concentrations in these link graphs, they map only very loosely indeed onto the UK ccTLD. Religion, national identity, and the ccTLD in Northern Ireland The island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920–1921 into the Irish Free State in the south (later the Republic of Ireland) with an overwhelming majority of Roman Catholics, while part of the province of Ulster in the north remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with a Protestant majority population. Although the relative proportions have varied, Northern Ireland always had a significant Roman Catholic minority population. It is not the task of this chapter to recount the history of the ‘Troubles’, the three decades of civil unrest and inter-community violence that were in significant part ended by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998; the literature on the subject is now very large, both on the national and international politics and the local experience, and over very short and very long spans of time (for example, Bew & Patterson, 1985; Howe, 2000). Two decades after the Agreement, it is still the case that many, although by no means all, in the Roman Catholic community identify with the political ideal of a united Ireland, while Protestants tend to retain a strong attachment to the United Kingdom. Within this very particular politico-religious nexus, the Christian churches themselves and their interactions have themselves attracted some historical attention, as their story is both intimately connected with, and distinct from, the wider issue (Ellis, 1992; Gallagher & Worrall, 1982; Power, 2007; Taggart, 2004). It has often been noted that Northern Ireland remains an unusually religious society, when compared to both the rest of the UK and other liberal democracies in the West; Steve Bruce has shown the degree to which the province is an exception to the pattern of secularisation visible elsewhere (Bruce, 2007, pp.53–60). Due to its very particular religious and political history, Northern Irish society has been characterised by an exceptional sensitivity to symbols, to history, and to place. The Northern Ireland Parades Commission was created in 1998 in order to facilitate mediation in the case of disputes concerning the numerous public processions that mark certain key historic dates. Such a procession is the Apprentice Boys March commemorating the ending of the siege in 1689 of the city still known as either Derry or Londonderry according to one’s view of national identity. The decision in 2012 to limit the flying of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall provoked widespread violent unrest in the province (BBC, 2012). The first part of this chapter explores the degree to which that sensitivity to space and symbol has been transferred online. Amongst the churches, Catholic and Protestant, in a province where the symbols of national identity have such prominence, does the location of a website within or outside the .uk domain carry any similar symbolic weight? 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Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web
National web spheres include content that resides within geographically nonspecific domains, such as .com or .org. However, little is known as to why this content ‘lives’ outside the ccTLD. The island of Ireland is formed of two political units with two ccTLDs (.uk and .ie). This chapter takes the case of the Christian churches in Ireland as a case study in the mapping between the nation and the ccTLD. It investigates the degree to which the differing historic attitudes of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches to national identity are reflected in patterns of domain registration. Based on data for 2015 and 2016, Roman Catholic congregations were more likely to register domains outside the .uk ccTLD. However, there was no corresponding prioritisation of registration within .uk for the several Protestant denominations. That organisations that might be expected to register their web estate within a particular national domain do not in fact do so suggests that the ‘gravitational pull’ of the ccTLD is weak. The chapter also shows that the networks of links between the individual Baptist church congregations on both sides of the border between 1996 and 2010 was both tightly focussed around the churches in Northern Ireland, and also highly localised within one part of the province, whilst being spread across four TLDs. While offline patterns of numeric strength and geographic concentration are reflected online, they map only very loosely onto the ccTLD. Understanding the limitations of the ccTLD as a proxy for the national web: lessons from cross-border religion in the northern Irish web sphere Peter Webster The writing of modern history has often depended on a stable notion of the state. Even if studies of nationalism have dealt subtly with the means by which people understand their relationships with both ethnic nations and the state as a political and legal entity, it has at least been possible to circumscribe the latter without significant difficulty. The world order that has persisted since the early modern period presupposes that persons have some form of citizenship, a legal identification with a state; even if they may hold more than one, each citizenship may stand on its own without legal ambiguity. Another of the fundamental assumptions of that system is that geographical space (at least on land) can usually be clearly divided into territorial units under unified and monopolistic systems of law and government. To elaborate an insight of Max Weber, in order for a state successfully to enforce a monopoly on the use of violence, it must first know where its boundaries are. The high-water mark of national schools of historical writing was perhaps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as compendia of national biographies were created alongside monumental editions of primary sources (examples include the Dictionary of National Biography in the UK, or the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Germany). Scholarly interest has broadened since to include the interactions between states and their peoples across borders, but still by and large supposing a fixity in those states at any one point in time. Studies of migration still must presuppose a point of origin and a point of arrival, both of which are located within physical space. Printed publications may circulate freely, but their publication is still governed by a national legal framework; something similar may be said of television and other broadcast media. The advent of the web presents historians with a new and somewhat perplexing question: where is it? What does it mean to think of the web in spatial and quasi-geographic terms? To what degree may we write national histories of the web? Where did a particular website ‘live’? Of where was it a resident or citizen, so to speak? These questions are explored more fully elsewhere in this volume, but several attempts have already been made, by dint of necessity, to define the parameters of a national web domain. Several nations have legal frameworks of very long standing that provide for the systematic creation of a record of a nation’s publishing, usually known as legal deposit. In extending these to cover non-print publication, which includes the web, it has perforce been necessary to formulate criteria by which to identify web content that falls within the remit of the law. Several such criteria have been adopted, singly or in combination, including the physical location of the server on which the data is hosted, the residence of the person or organisation registering the domain name, and the language in which the content is written (Webster, 2017, 2018b). However, in most cases, the task of defining a national web domain has begun with one or more country code top-level domains (ccTLD) even if it has not ended with them. This chapter examines the nature of the .uk ccTLD as a proxy for the UK web by means of a case study of the web estate of the Christian churches in Northern Ireland. The society of Northern Ireland is marked by an interlinking of religious and national identity, which may be unique in Europe if not, indeed, in the world. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem an unusual case from which to generalise about the nature of national web domains. However, it is through examinations of marginal or exceptional cases such as this that the 1 On the role of national print communities in the development of modern nationalism, see Anderson (1991), pp.37–46. 2 The creation and regulation of ccTLDs is the responsibility of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Registration of individual domains in each ccTLD is delegated to national registrars; in the case of the UK, this is the responsibility of Nominet. ambiguities of the situation are brought into relief. This chapter uses data provided by the British Library to reconstruct the link relationships between churches in Northern Ireland, examining the regional, national, and crossborder relationships that they imply. In doing so, it argues that even though there are indeed clear geographic concentrations in these link graphs, they map only very loosely indeed onto the UK ccTLD. Religion, national identity, and the ccTLD in Northern Ireland The island of Ireland was partitioned in 1920–1921 into the Irish Free State in the south (later the Republic of Ireland) with an overwhelming majority of Roman Catholics, while part of the province of Ulster in the north remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland, with a Protestant majority population. Although the relative proportions have varied, Northern Ireland always had a significant Roman Catholic minority population. It is not the task of this chapter to recount the history of the ‘Troubles’, the three decades of civil unrest and inter-community violence that were in significant part ended by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998; the literature on the subject is now very large, both on the national and international politics and the local experience, and over very short and very long spans of time (for example, Bew & Patterson, 1985; Howe, 2000). Two decades after the Agreement, it is still the case that many, although by no means all, in the Roman Catholic community identify with the political ideal of a united Ireland, while Protestants tend to retain a strong attachment to the United Kingdom. Within this very particular politico-religious nexus, the Christian churches themselves and their interactions have themselves attracted some historical attention, as their story is both intimately connected with, and distinct from, the wider issue (Ellis, 1992; Gallagher & Worrall, 1982; Power, 2007; Taggart, 2004). It has often been noted that Northern Ireland remains an unusually religious society, when compared to both the rest of the UK and other liberal democracies in the West; Steve Bruce has shown the degree to which the province is an exception to the pattern of secularisation visible elsewhere (Bruce, 2007, pp.53–60). Due to its very particular religious and political history, Northern Irish society has been characterised by an exceptional sensitivity to symbols, to history, and to place. The Northern Ireland Parades Commission was created in 1998 in order to facilitate mediation in the case of disputes concerning the numerous public processions that mark certain key historic dates. Such a procession is the Apprentice Boys March commemorating the ending of the siege in 1689 of the city still known as either Derry or Londonderry according to one’s view of national identity. The decision in 2012 to limit the flying of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall provoked widespread violent unrest in the province (BBC, 2012). The first part of this chapter explores the degree to which that sensitivity to space and symbol has been transferred online. Amongst the churches, Catholic and Protestant, in a province where the symbols of national identity have such prominence, does the location of a website within or outside the .uk domain carry any similar symbolic weight? Might those churches most associated with unionism be more likely to register in the UK ccTLD than Roman Catholic churches? At this point, the scholar bumps up against the fact that researchers know almost nothing of the patterns of registration in individual TLDs. An indication of the scale of the question is given by a 2015 investigation by the British Library, which found more than 2.5 million hosts that were physically located in the UK without having .uk domain names (UK Web Archive, 2015). This would suggest that as much as a third of the UK web may lie outside its ccTLD. There has so far been almost no research that compares this pattern with other national domains, although related 3 In this context, a host is that element of a web domain that may be expressed in the form news.bbc.com. As such, single domains may have many hosts (although not necessarily). In practical terms, host is largely synonymou