The Digital Afterlife: Web Cemeteries and Their Potential for Sport History

Death notices and obituaries have existed for centuries and have been democratized to include ordinary people previously deemed unworthy of public commemoration. With the advent of the internet, mortuaries, newspapers, survivors, and memorial websites have broadcast these life epilogues online along with guestbooks, transforming monologic cyber obituaries into dialogic web cemeteries. While critics argue the internet promotes social isolation, some thanatologists counter that web cemeteries foster (para)social relationships. They contend these digital platforms are sites of meaningful personal expression and community building and combat modern society’s institutionalization of death. However, sport historians have yet to thoroughly investigate these sources, which offer much to those interpreting the human experience. This paper illustrates how web cemeteries can be valuable sources for historians researching sporting persons, communities, and fandoms; it shows how web cemeteries reveal people’s identifying features and values, their shared characteristics and experiences, and how they coped with life and death, allowing broader contemplation on historical inequities and disparities with implications beyond sport. Various applications and approaches suitable for web cemeteries are discussed here. Though not exhaustive, these provide historians a framework and point of departure for examining novel sources to develop nuanced historical inquiry and interpretation.