We are delighted to share the news that the inaugural Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship in Digital Sustainability will be awarded to Prof. Ian Milligan, assistant professor of digital and Canadian history at the University of Waterloo.
Between July 2016 and June 2017, Prof. Milligan will be collaborating with researchers at the DCI, visiting the DCI and the iSchool and holding lectures and workshops. Stay tuned for announcements of events in fall!
Ian Milligan is a digital and Canadian historian. He’s currently exploring how historians can fruitfully use web archives and other large digital repositories. Ian has been nominated for leading awards by both the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. In 2016, he was awarded the Outstanding Early Career Award by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, and in 2015 he was nominated for the John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History by the Canadian Historical Association.
Ian also works in the area of postwar Canadian youth and labour history, which he continues to publish in. His first award-losing book, Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada, was published in 2014 by the University of British Columbia Press. Ian’s second peer-reviewed book, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope, a handbook aimed at demystifying digital methods, appeared in late 2015 with Imperial College Press. He wrote this with Shawn Graham (Carleton) and Scott Weingart (Carnegie Mellon). You can read the post-peer reviewed but pre-proofed (post-print) online!
Ian’s current projects largely involve how historians can deal with the sheer quantities of digital data that are profoundly reworking how we research, teach, and write. He has published work on web archives in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (which won their 2013 Best Article award), the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, Digital Studies, code4lib, and in the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. An additional research project explores the nature of online databases and born-digital sources more generally, which Milligan has published in the Canadian Historical Review. A recent article in Social History/Histoire Sociale applies digital methods to our understanding of children and early Internet regulation in Canada.
In addition to publications, Ian is working on portals to access web archives through the Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK) project. An early prototype can be found at http://webarchives.ca.
Ian regularly blogs at http://ianmilligan.ca/ and tweets professionally at @ianmilligan1. A full profile can be found at Ian’s UWaterloo page.
This Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship in Digital Sustainability was awarded through a competitive peer-reviewed selection process.