Representing digital scholarship digitally

Steve Schneider and I have been experimenting with ways to represent digital scholarship digitally, and are interested in others' innovations in this area. Our most recent effort in this regard is a digital installation based on Web archives that we produced to accompany a book we wrote on how electoral campaigns use the Web (*Web Campaigning*, MIT Press, 2006). The digital installation was released on the MIT Press website (http://mitpress.mit.edu/webcampaigning), corresponding with the publication of the book. We took a "virtual archaeology" approach in this book, and our analysis centers on the inherent tension between the desire of campaigns to maintain control over messages and resources and the generally decentralizing dynamic of Web-based communication. The digital installation allowed us to make the book text interactive, integrate screenshots of all the web pages (nearly 300) that we reference in the book as objects of critique, and provide persistant links to archival impressions of most of those pages so that they can be explored in their original hypertextual context. These elements enabled the creation of digital montages illustrating core concepts from the book. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive scholarly use of materials available in Web archives to date. The tiddlywiki platform we employed in the digital installation has some interesting affordances, and we’d like feedback on it. As this is a new approach to digital scholarship, we’d certainly appreciate hearing what others think of any aspect of it.