Reading creationism in the web archive: a utopian dream, a conspiracy theory and a moral panic

Peter WebsterWebster Research and Consulting@pj_webster

Creationism ?• non-evolutionary account of human

origins

• modern

• a long history

• a feature of some parts of evangelicalism

• (anti-evolutionism, Intelligent Design)

Three questionsA justified conspiracy theory about marginalisation of creationist voices?

A real danger or a moral panic (Truth in Science) ?

The web as friend of the marginalised opinion?

Data: UK Host Link Graph (1996-2010)

1996 | appserver.ed.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1 1996 | art-www.acorn.co.uk | portico.bl.uk 1 1996 | astra.ich.ucl.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1 1996 | back.niss.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 1 1996 | beta.bids.ac.uk | portico.bl.uk 2

19GB, available at: http://tinyurl.com/kon2eve

Approach • selection of key UK creationist sites

• extraction of all unique inbound referring hosts for 1996-2010

• inspection and classification

Caveats on method • partial nature of the dataset

• benchmarking of absolute numbers

• selective sample

• what does a link mean, anyway ?

• not looking at number of linking resources per host

Truth in Science: how significant? • only 46 unique inbound hosts

• … of which many were other creationists or secularist sites

• two churches, one school

• fewer in 2010 than 2007

Conclusions • a utopian dream unfulfilled

• a genuine moral panic

• a justified conspiracy theory?

Questions ? Peter Websterpeter@websterresearchconsulting.com@pj_websterpeterwebster.mewebsterresearchconsulting.com