Digital Preservation & Web Archaeology Symposium
Proceedings for the 25th Annual Conference on Early Internet Preservation, Digital Forensics, and Web Reconstruction
Call for Papers
The 1990 Web Archive invites scholarly, technical, and practitioner submissions for the 2025 conference proceedings. We focus on the intersection of digital preservation, web archaeology, and the cultural/technical legacy of the pre-2000 internet.
- Double-blind peer review process
- Accepted papers will be published in the official proceedings (DOI assigned)
- All submissions archived permanently via IPFS & traditional repositories
- Format: LaTeX template or Markdown (8-10 pages + references)
Research Tracks
Early Web Infrastructure
HTTP/1.0, CGI, early DNS, mailto protocols, and pre-HTTPS communication layers.
Personal Publishing & GeoCities
Homepages, guestbooks, webrings, counter scripts, and the sociology of early self-hosting.
Browser Archaeology
Netscape, IE3, Mosaic, rendering engines, deprecated HTML/CSS, and plugin ecosystems.
Digital Forensics & Recovery
Dead URL reconstruction, server log analysis, disk imaging of early systems, and packet replay.
AI & Web Reconstruction
Machine learning for layout restoration, missing asset synthesis, and automated crawling heuristics.
Ethics & Digital Heritage
Right to be forgotten vs. archival integrity, cultural preservation, and community consent models.
Accepted Papers (Partial)
| ID | Title | Authors | Track |
|---|---|---|---|
| CP-2025-014 | Reconstructing Netscape 3.0 Rendering Pipelines via Emulated DOM Traversal | E. Vance, M. Chen, L. Orso | Browser Archaeology |
| CP-2025-028 | The Sociology of GeoCities Guestbooks: Digital Identity in the Pre-Social Media Era | A. Rossi, J. Park | Personal Publishing |
| CP-2025-041 | CGI-BIN Forensics: Extracting Execution Logs from 1990s Perl Scripts | S. Nakamura, T. Weber | Digital Forensics |
| CP-2025-055 | Diffusion Models for Missing GIF Asset Restoration in Archived Sites | K. Lin, R. Gupta, F. Alvarez | AI & Reconstruction |
| CP-2025-062 | Archival Ethics in the Age of Automated Crawling: A Framework for Consent | D. Okonkwo, M. Silva | Ethics & Heritage |
Important Dates
Publication & Review
All accepted papers will be compiled into the 1990 Web Archive Conference Proceedings Vol. 25. Each paper receives a permanent DOI, IPFS hash, and is indexed in standard academic databases.
Review criteria emphasize technical rigor, reproducibility, historical accuracy, and contribution to digital preservation methodology. Plagiarism checks are mandatory. Late submissions are not accepted.