[Air-L] Call For Participation: Web Archiving Datathon with Archives Unleashed Toolkit 26-27 April 2018, University of Toronto

[Ian Milligan]

Apologies for cross-posts - and please forward to any interested parties!

Archives Unleashed: Call for Participation 
Web Data at Scale with the Archives Unleashed Toolkit: Web Archive Datathon
Robarts Library, University of Toronto 
26-27 April 2018
http://archivesunleashed.org/toronto/

Web Archives

The World Wide Web has a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form, presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this information is captured within web archives.

Web archives often contain hundreds of billions of web pages, ranging from individual homepages and social media posts, to institutional websites. These archives offer tremendous potential for social scientists and humanists, and the questions research may pose stretch across a multitude of fields. In short, web archives offer the ability to reconstruct large-scale traces of the relatively recent past.

Archives Unleashed Toolkit

This event is tailored towards web archives practitioners and researchers. The Archives Unleashed datathon presents an opportunity for librarians, archivists, researchers, computer scientists, and others to collaboratively work with web collections and explore cutting-edge research tools through hands on experience. 

This event will bring together a small group of approximately 15 participants to experiment with the newest release of AUT (Archives Unleashed Toolkit) and the Archives Unleashed Cloud, and to kick-off collaboratively inspired research projects. Participants will have access to analytics software and specialists, and will be exposed to the process of working with web archive files at scale. For more information on AUT and the Cloud, please visit http://archivesunleashed.org/. 

Over the next two years, there will be subsequent events: one in the eastern United States, one in western Canada, and one in the western area of the United States. Accordingly, we prioritize regional applicants from central and eastern Canada and the northeastern United States.

Sponsors + Travel Grants

This event is possible thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Toronto Libraries, and the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts. The Archives Unleashed team is pleased to offer modest travel grants to help attendees participate in this event. These grants can cover up to $1,000 CAD in travel expenses. If you require financial assistance to attend the event, please indicate in your statement of interest that you would like to be considered for the travel grant. 

Submission Guidelines

Those interested in participating should send a 250-word expression of interest and a short one-page CV to the Archives Unleashed Team (archivesunleashed at gmail.com) by midnight on 5 February 2018. This expression of interest should address your background and interests in web archiving, and what you would hope to get out of working with tools and web archive data at scale. Applicants will be notified by 19 February 2018. 

On behalf of the organizers,

Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo), Nicholas Worby (University of Toronto), Nick Ruest (York University), and Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo).

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Ian Milligan | Associate Professor | Department of History
University of Waterloo | 200 University Ave W Waterloo ON N2L 3G1
+1 (519) 888-4567 x32775 | http://ianmilligan.ca <http://ianmilligan.ca/> | @ianmilligan1 <https://twitter.com/ianmilligan1>