How are Web Archives Made and Used? A report and discussion on work in progress at the DCI

The DCI invites anyone interested to join us for an informal presentation of our ongoing work with the Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellow in Digital Sustainability, Ian Milligan, on Thursday February 9 from 12-1 in BL 417We’ll have a few refreshments and are happy to extend the discussion afterwards.

Prof. Ian Milligan, PhD student Emily Maemura and Prof. Christoph Becker will present and discuss ongoing collaborative research about the making of web archives and their use as scholarly sources. Our joint research investigates the use of web archives in historical research; the curation processes in which web archives are created; and the infrastructure that underpins these activities.

We will present parts of the paper recently published at the Computational Archival Science workshop at the IEEE Big Data conference in Washington; new project ideas and PhD research plans; and intermediate findings from our ongoing collaboration with librarian Nich Worby, who manages the University of Toronto Libraries web archiving activities.  Some of this can be found in the IEEE Big Data paper (see the DCI publications page) and has been summarized by Emily Maemura on the DCI blog (see Web Archiving: Past, Present and Future and Computational Archival Science Workshop (Part 2) – Studying User Perspectives and Archives in Use). Later this year, our work will also be presented at the IIPC Web Archiving conference and the RESAW conference on the Study of Archived Web materials in London, UK.