Determining place online is rarely straightforward. Some sites reveal their location directly through a listed address or contact details, while others can be inferred from subtler clues like IP address data, domain registration records, embedded map coordinates, or even text on an “About” page mentioning a city or region.

In this archive, the web archivists manually identified the location of some organisations, while the others were computationally extracted from the website content during the research. Patterns vary by geography. In rural areas, local life is often represented by a handful of community, church, or council websites — sometimes the only digital traces of a town. Cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee, by contrast, show a much richer and more varied web presence.

Together, these sources of geolocation data reveal clear clusters of online activity across Scotland, offering a glimpse into how the nation’s digital landscape has taken shape and how unevenly it is preserved.