了解ccTLD作为国家网络代理的局限性

P. Webster
{"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? 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). 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引用次数: 6

摘要

国家网络领域包括驻留在地理上不特定的域内的内容,例如。com或。org。然而,很少有人知道为什么这些内容“存在”在ccTLD之外。爱尔兰岛由两个政治单位组成,拥有两个国家顶级域名(cctld)。英国和英国)。本章以爱尔兰基督教会为例,对国家与ccTLD的映射进行了案例研究。它调查了新教和罗马天主教教会对民族认同的不同历史态度在域名注册模式中的反映程度。根据2015年和2016年的数据,罗马天主教会众更有可能注册。uk ccTLD以外的域名。然而,对于几个新教教派,在。uk中没有相应的注册优先级。那些可能被期望在特定国家域名内注册其网站的组织实际上并没有这样做,这表明ccTLD的“引力”很弱。本章还显示,1996年至2010年间,边界两侧的浸信会会众之间的联系网络既紧密地集中在北爱尔兰的教堂周围,也高度集中在该省的一个地区,同时分布在四个顶级域名。虽然数字强度和地理集中的离线模式在在线上得到反映,但它们仅非常松散地映射到ccTLD上。理解ccTLD作为国家网络代理的局限性:来自北爱尔兰网络领域跨境宗教的教训彼得韦伯斯特现代史的写作往往依赖于一个稳定的国家概念。即使对民族主义的研究巧妙地处理了人们理解他们与民族国家和作为政治和法律实体的国家的关系的方法,但至少有可能在没有重大困难的情况下界定后者。自近代早期以来一直存在的世界秩序以个人拥有某种形式的公民权、对国家的法律认同为前提;即使他们可能拥有一个以上的国籍,每个国籍都可以独立存在,没有法律歧义。该系统的另一个基本假设是,地理空间(至少在陆地上)通常可以在统一和垄断的法律和政府系统下明确划分为领土单位。为了阐述马克斯·韦伯的观点,一个国家要想成功地垄断暴力的使用,它必须首先知道它的边界在哪里。国家历史写作学派的高潮可能是在19世纪末和20世纪初,因为国家传记的纲要与主要来源的纪念性版本一起创建(例子包括英国的国家传记词典,或德国的纪念碑德国历史)。从那以后,学者的兴趣已经扩大到包括国家之间及其人民跨越国界的相互作用,但总的来说,仍然假设这些国家在任何一个时间点都是固定的。对移徙的研究仍然必须假定有一个始发点和到达点,这两个点都位于物理空间内。印刷出版物可以自由流通,但其出版仍受国家法律框架的约束;类似的情况也适用于电视和其他广播媒体。网络的出现向历史学家提出了一个新的、有点令人困惑的问题:它在哪里?从空间和准地理的角度来思考网络意味着什么?我们可以在多大程度上书写网络的国家历史?一个特定的网站“生活”在哪里?可以说,它是哪里的居民或公民?这些问题在本卷的其他地方进行了更全面的探讨,但由于必要性,已经进行了几次尝试,以定义国家网络域的参数。一些国家有历史悠久的法律框架,规定系统地创建一个国家的出版记录,通常被称为法定存款。在将这些规定扩展到包括网络在内的非印刷出版物时,必须制定标准,以确定哪些网络内容属于法律的管辖范围。已经单独或组合采用了几个这样的标准,包括托管数据的服务器的物理位置,注册域名的个人或组织的居住地以及编写内容的语言(韦伯斯特,2017,2018b)。然而,在大多数情况下,定义国家网络域名的任务开始于一个或多个国家代码顶级域名(ccTLD),即使它没有以它们结束。本章通过对北爱尔兰基督教会网络遗产的案例研究,考察了。UK ccTLD作为英国网络代理的性质。 北爱尔兰社会的特点是宗教和民族身份的相互联系,这在欧洲可能是独一无二的,如果不是在世界上的话。因此,从表面上看,这似乎是一个不寻常的案例,由此来概括国家网络域名的性质。然而,正是通过对诸如此类的边缘或例外案例的考察,《论民族印刷社区在现代民族主义发展中的作用》(见Anderson(1991),第37 - 46页)才得以实现。cctld的创建和监管是ICANN(互联网名称与数字地址分配机构)的责任。每个ccTLD中单个域名的注册被委托给国家注册商;就英国而言,这是Nominet的责任。形势的模糊性得到了缓解。本章使用大英图书馆提供的数据来重建北爱尔兰教堂之间的联系关系,检查它们所暗示的地区、国家和跨境关系。在这样做的过程中,它认为,尽管这些链接图中确实有明显的地理集中,但它们对英国ccTLD的映射确实非常松散。爱尔兰岛在1920-1921年分裂为南部的爱尔兰自由邦(后来的爱尔兰共和国),其中绝大多数是罗马天主教徒,而北部阿尔斯特省的一部分仍然是联合王国北爱尔兰的一部分,其中新教徒占多数人口。尽管相对比例有所不同,但北爱尔兰一直有相当多的罗马天主教少数民族人口。本章的任务不是讲述“麻烦”的历史,即三十年的内乱和社区间暴力,这些在很大程度上是由1998年的耶稣受难日协议结束的;关于这一主题的文献现在非常多,既有国内的,也有国际的,也有当地的经验,而且跨度很短,也很长(例如,Bew & Patterson, 1985;豪,2000)。在《协定》签署二十年后,罗马天主教社区中的许多人,虽然不是全部,仍然认同一个统一的爱尔兰的政治理想,而新教徒则倾向于对联合王国保持强烈的依恋。在这种非常特殊的政治-宗教关系中,基督教会本身及其相互作用本身吸引了一些历史关注,因为他们的故事既与更广泛的问题密切相关,又与之不同(Ellis, 1992;Gallagher & Worrall, 1982;力量,2007;Taggart, 2004)。人们经常注意到,与英国其他地区和西方其他自由民主国家相比,北爱尔兰仍然是一个不同寻常的宗教社会;史蒂夫·布鲁斯已经表明,该省在某种程度上是其他地方可见的世俗化模式的一个例外(布鲁斯,2007,第53 - 60页)。由于其非常特殊的宗教和政治历史,北爱尔兰社会的特点是对符号、历史和地点的异常敏感。北爱尔兰游行委员会成立于1998年,目的是促进调解与纪念某些重要历史日期的众多公众游行有关的争端。这样的游行就是学徒男孩游行,纪念1689年包围城市的结束,根据人们对国家认同的看法,这个城市现在被称为德里或伦敦德里。2012年限制在贝尔法斯特市政厅悬挂英国国旗的决定引发了该省广泛的暴力骚乱(BBC, 2012)。本章的第一部分探讨了这种对空间和符号的敏感转移到网上的程度。在天主教和新教的教会中,在一个国家身份象征如此突出的省份,网站在。uk域名内或外的位置是否具有类似的象征意义?那些与工会主义联系最紧密的教堂是否比罗马天主教教堂更有可能在英国注册ccTLD ?在这一点上,学者遇到了这样一个事实,即研究人员对单个顶级域名的注册模式几乎一无所知。大英图书馆2015年的一项调查显示了这个问题的规模,该调查发现,超过250万台主机位于英国,但没有。UK域名(UK Web Archive, 2015)。这意味着多达三分之一的英国网络可能不在其ccTLD范围内。到目前为止,几乎没有研究将这种模式与其他国家域名进行比较,尽管在这里,主机是网络域名中可能以news.bbc.com形式表示的元素。因此,单个域可以有许多主机(尽管不一定)。
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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
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