New Media, Old Methods: Archiving and Close Reading the Sports Blog

The humanities are increasingly digitized: scholars now have online access to a breathtaking array of previously printed scholarship, primary-source documents, and data. But what about those texts that are born on the web? Does the digital humanities also have room for those who would humanistically analyze the digital? What does it mean to attempt to historicize and close read a medium that can disappear in an instant? Who is archiving the digital present? In this paper I discuss the methods I used in my book project in order to archive and analyze three blogs: FreeDarko.com, FireJoeMorgan.com, and PowerForward.net. I discuss the challenges of dealing with dead links and disappearing websites. I challenge both what constitutes sports history and who gets to record it through a consideration of the ways fans think and write about sports.