Web archives have been around for over twenty years – while the collections are great, access and usage remain a considerable problem. Historians and others need to get involved to explore various models for research access. But how do we even get things started?

It will require community. It isn’t just going to be historians working on their lonesome that are going to be able to bootstrap a revolution in the use of web archives for historical research… but neither is it going to be computer scientists on their own, or librarians, or communications scholars, or any one disciplinary perspective. We will all need to work together.

Enter the Archives Unleashed series of datathons. To date, we have held three events: one at the University of Toronto (3 – 5 March 2016), a second at the Library of Congress (14-15 June 2016), and a third at the Internet Archive (23 – 24 February 2017). We have a fourth event scheduled at the British Library (12 – 13 June 2017). Our organizing team consists of myself and colleagues from Waterloo, Rutgers, Toronto, and Quebec. In London, we’re sponsored by the amazing British Library – and in particular assisted by the amazing Olga Holownia.

These datathons aim to get people working together to accomplish four main points:

• Building a community that could cohere around Web archives, finding scholarly voices);
• Articulate a common vision of web archiving development and tool development, to give the field some additional shape;
• To avoid the black boxes of search engines we don’t understand – if you run a search on billions of documents, you need to know why the search engine has given you the first ten or twenty results, or else it’ll really be writing your histories for you;
• And most importantly, equipping us as a collective – here I really mean society more generally – to work with born-digital cultural resources.

This means that we need to bring different perspectives together. Hackers, or those who can work with data and code, to make our vision a reality and generate new accessible open-source code that can let us rise to this reality. But also yackers – or humanists – who have technical chops to have meaningful conversations, but who can bring their professional wisdom developed over years of theoretical and historical engagement.

Accordingly, these datathons bring together the authors of various web archive analytics platforms, collecting institutions, and researchers to collaborate on how best to develop the tools, frameworks, and access platforms needed to work with these materials. They have the three-fold goal of facilitating web archives access, community building, and graduate skills training. Each event has seen us bring together fifty individuals, break them into interdisciplinary teams, provide the teams with web archival data and computing infrastructure, and set them to work. The results have been significant: analyses of political party websites, social media streams, and the development of dynamic tools. For example, one team at the Toronto version generated the in-browser D3.js visualizer that is now part of Warcbase. Another team at the Library of Congress datathon worked with the 2004 American federal election crawl and created a visualization to show the geographic locations mentioned by parties and candidates in the final days of the election.

We can’t wait for our next event at the British Library! Stay tuned for some news out of that, as the teams form, the projects are put together, and conversations about the future of web archiving research and community continue.

Nick Ruest, Anna St-Onge, and myself wrote a piece in the open-access journal Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, “The Great WARC Adventure: Using SIPS, AIPS, and DIPS to Document SLAPPS.” The deliberately acronym-heavy title underlies a piece that does the following:

• takes readers through the process of creating a web archive using open-source tools;
• preserving and providing access to the web archive;
• and enabling some basic analysis on the collection from the perspective of a historian.

While the long publishing time meant that some of our more recent approaches to analyzing web archives – warcbase, for example – didn’t make it in, the article hopefully provides a useful conceptual approach to working with web archives.

You can find the article here, and abstract below. We hope that you enjoy it! Continue reading Interdisciplinary Event Documentation: “The Great WARC Adventure” →

By Niels Brügger

Let us assume that the internet is here to stay. And that it becomes still more pivotal to have solid scholarly knowledge about the development of the internet of the past with a view to understanding the internet of the present and of the future; on the one hand, past events constitute important preconditions for todays internet, and, on the other, the mechanisms behind the developments in the past may prove very helpful for understanding what is about to happen with the internet today.

Based on this rationale the new scholarly journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor&Francis/Routledge) has just been founded.

For more than four decades the internet has continued to grow and spread to an extent where today it is an indispensable element in the communicative infrastructure of many countries. Although the history of the internet has not been very predominant within the academic literature an increased number of books and journal articles within the last decade attest to the fact that internet historiography is an emerging field of study within internet studies, as well as within studies of culture, media, communication, and technology.

However, in the main the historical studies of the internet have been published in journals related to a variety of disciplines, and these journals do only rarely publish articles with a clear historical focus. Therefore, the editors of Internet Histories found that there was a need for a journal where the history of the internet and digital cultures is the main focus, a journal where historical studies are presented, and theoretical and methodological issues are debated with a view to constituting the history of the internet as a field of study in its own right.

Internet Histories embraces empirical as well as theoretical and methodological studies within the field of the history of the internet broadly conceived — from early computer networks, Usenet and Bulletin Board Systems, to everyday Internet with the web through the emergence of new forms of internet with mobile phones and tablet computers, social media, and the internet of things. The journal will also provide the premier outlet for cutting-edge research in the closely related area of histories of digital cultures.

The title of the journal, Internet Histories, suggests there is not one single and fixed Internet history going straight from Arpanet to the Internet as we know it today, from United States to a world-wide network. Rather, there are multiple local, regional and national paths and a variety of ways that the internet has been imagined, designed, used, shaped, and regulated around the world. Internet Histories aims to publish a range of scholarship that examines the global and internetworked nature of the digital world as well as situated histories that account for diverse local contexts.

Managing Editor
Niels Brügger, Aarhus University, Denmark

Editors
Megan Ankerson, University of Michigan, USA
Gerard Goggin, University of Sydney, Australia
Valérie Schafer, National Center for Scientific Research, France

Reviews Editor
Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, Canada

Editorial Assistant
Asger Harlung, Aarhus University, Denmark

More information about the journal can be found at the journal website: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rint20

I recently had the opportunity to attend – via Beam Telepresence robot – a talk by Richard Vijgen, creator of the 2011 “Deleted City” art exhibit, and GeoCities founder David Bohnett. The “Deleted City” was hosted in the lobby of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and the talks marked the end of the exhibit. I won’t give a full recapping of the talk, as I always find those difficult to both write and read, but will give a few impressions alongside the video!

They were both fascinating talks, available via YouTube above. Richard’s talk was fascinating in that it explored what Big Data means for historians – and recounted his experience of working with the Archive Team torrent. To me, the talk really underscored the importance of doing web history: the web really is the record of our lives today, and we need to hope that there are people there to back up this sort of information!

It was followed by David Bohnett, who explained the idea behind GeoCities, some of the technical challenges he faced, and really what it was like to preside over such explosive growth during the dot com era. As somebody who’s explored ideas of GeoCities as a community before, I was interested to hear so much emphasis placed in his talk upon the neighbourhood structure, volunteer community leaders, and what this all meant for bringing people together. As a writer on this topic, it was pretty interesting and reassuring to hear that my own ideas weren’t off kilter!

I was also surprised, although perhaps I shouldn’t have been, with his attitude towards the closure of GeoCities in 2009 by Yahoo! (which bought it in 1999) – that it was “better shut down than to go on as this abandoned version of its former self.” Fair enough, I suppose, but again – to echo Richard’s opening talk – thank god that Archive Team and the Internet Archive were there to preserve this information…

Anyways, check the video out for yourself if you’re interested.

2017 offers not one but two international conferences for scholars interested in the way we use the archived web.

There are calls for papers open now for both.

Curation and research use of the past Web
(The Web Archiving Conference of the International Internet Preservation Consortium)
Lisbon, 29-30 March 2017
Call for Papers now open, closing date 20 October 2016.

Researchers, practitioners and the archived Web
(2nd conference of ReSAW, the Europe-wide Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials)
London, 14-15 June 2017
Call for Papers now open, closing date 9 December 2016.

Both Ian and Peter are delighted to be part of a new research network in the UK, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for twelve months. There are further details on the network website, some of which are given below.

“This new research network will bring together researchers and practitioners […] to discern if there is a genuine humanities approach to born-digital data, and to establish how this might inform, complement and draw on other disciplines and practices. Over the course of three workshops […] the network will address the current state of the field; establish the most appropriate tools and methods for humanities researchers for whom born-digital material is an important primary source; discuss the ways in which researchers and archives can work together to facilitate big data research; identify the barriers to engagement with big data, particularly in relation to skills; and work to build an engaged and lasting community of interest. The focus of the network will be on history, but it will also encompass other humanities and social science disciplines. The network will also include representatives of non-humanities disciplines, including the computer, social and information sciences. Interdisciplinarity and collaborative working are essential to digital research, and particularly in such a new and complex area of investigation.

“During the 12 months of the project all members of the network will contribute to a web resource, which will present key themes and ideas to both an academic and wider audience of the interested general public. External experts from government, the media and other relevant sectors will also be invited to contribute, to ensure that the network takes account of a range of opinions and needs. The exchange of knowledge and experience that takes place at the workshops will also be distilled into a white paper, which will be published under a CC-BY licence in month 12 of the network.