Internet Archives
Internet Archive: an attempt to take "snapshots" of the billions of web pages that come into existence (and disappear) every year.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe): a peer-to-peer technology application designed to insure the long-term survival of digital media of all types.
Internet Backbone Map: because text stored on the Internet is not affixed to a paper or parchment substrate, but rather manifested in pixels on screens when data is piped to the CPU which runs these displays, the pipelines through which the data travels must also be understood as part of the "archeology of Internet text." This map, created in 2006, is now obsolete for operational purposes, but it will do to represent this component of "Internet text" for our discussions.
Bob Lash, "Memoir of a Homebrew Computer Club Member": before the personal computer was made commercially practical by Jobs and Wozniak (Apple's founders), there was a period of excited amateur computer construction and programming that swept 1970s-80s America. Bob Lash was lucky enough to live in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University, where many important experiments in computer design were going on, and the site of Palo Alto Research Center (AKA "Xerox PARC), site of the nation's first experiments in "graphical user interfaces" that represented programs and documents as icons on a display screen, activated them with a moveable cursor controlled with a hand-driven "mouse," and countless other inventions that Xerox (weirdly) never took commercial advantage of, hence Apple's success. Homebrew was a crucial "incubator" of hardware, software, and networking talent that made major contributions to the Internet's invention and development.
"How the Moby Shakespeare Took Over the Internet": (Eric M. Johnson, George Mason University M.A. Thesis): while pursuing his M.A. project, the "Open-Source Shakespeare," he uncovered the fascinating story of how a digitized copy of the 1864 Globe edition Shakespeare's works came to spread, weed-like, to all corners of the Internet. The "Moby Shakespeare" is so old, in Internet-years, that its origins cannot be authoritatively determined other than that it must derive from some version of the Globe edition. The essay linked above can serve as an illustration of how the web economy reproduces "Gresham's Law," which predicts that the weaker/cheaper currency drives out the stronger. The prevalence and widespread acceptance (by amateurs) of the Moby Shakespeare text, owned and protected by no scholarly authority, slowed or stopped production of up-to-date online Shakespeare editions produced by scholars.
The National Archive (a hybrid site: mostly print / part digital).
Modern Literature Online Surrogate Sites (Note: these sites are based on digitized early printed books and manuscripts, but they have achieved enough funding and infrastructural durability to be considered archives in their own right.)
Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page (The oldest such site on the Internet, Project Gutenberg was founded by Michael Hart in 1971 to make freely available out-of-copyright works of literature, political documents, etc.)
University of Virginia Library "Electronic Text Collections--Scholar's Lab": http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/collections/subjects/ Once known as the "E-Text Initiative," this era and topic organized list of scholarly editions is now part of the UVa library's digital resources, access to some of which are restricted to UVa users only. The E-texts are public access.
The Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/ (Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, at the University of Virginia)
The William Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
German Emblem Books (Early Modern Print): http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/
Renaissance Literature Online Surrogate Sites
Project Perseus Renaissance Online (Marlowe, Shakespeare, etc.): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Renaissance.html
2007 Press Stories about Digital Texts as Literature and Digital Search Engines are Archivists