[Air-L] Call for Participation: Archives Unleashed 3.0: Web Archive Datathon

Ian Milligan i2millig at uwaterloo.ca
Thu Jan 12 14:12:28 PST 2017


[apologies for cross-posting]

Call for Participation: Archives Unleashed 3.0: Web Archive Datathon

http://archivesunleashed.com

Internet Archive, San Francisco CA
23 - 24 February 2017
We expect to be able to offer travel grants for US-based graduate students
Applications due 20 January 2017

***Call for Participation***

**This event is a follow-up to the Archives Unleashed datathon series - the
first was held in March 2016 in Toronto and the second was held in June
2016 Washington DC. We’re continuing the datathon program in 2017, and are
excited to bring this program to the Internet Archive.**

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. Scholars broaching topics dating back to the mid-1990s will find
their projects enhanced by web data. Moreover, scholars hoping to study the
evolution of cultural and societal phenomena will find a treasure trove of
data in web archives. In short, web archives offer the ability to
reconstruct large-scale traces of the relatively recent past.

While there has been considerable discussion about web archive tools and
datasets, few forums or mechanisms for coordinated, mutually informing
development efforts have been created. Our series of datathons presents an
opportunity to collaboratively unleash our web collections, exploring
cutting-edge research tools while fostering a broad-based consensus on
future directions in web archive analysis.

This event will bring together a small group of 20-30 participants to
collaboratively develop new open-source tools and approaches to web
archives, and to kick-off collaboratively inspired research projects.
Researchers should be comfortable with command line interactions, and
knowledge of a scripting language (such as but not limited to Python) is
strongly desired. By bringing together a group of like-minded scholars and
programmers, we hope to begin building unified analytic production effort
and to continue coalescing this nascent research community.

At this event, we hope to continue to converge on a shared vision of future
directions in the use of web archives for inquiry in the humanities and
social sciences in order to build a community of practice around various
web archive analytics platforms and tools.

***Please also save the date! Archives Unleashed 4.0 will be held at the
British Library in London, UK, June 11 - 13. Check back here at
http://archivesunleashed.com/au4-0-british-invasion/ for more details ***

Thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation, the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University
of Waterloo’s Department of History, the David R. Cheriton School of
Computer Science and the University of Waterloo, and the School of
Communication and Information at Rutgers University, we will cover lunches
and refreshments for attendees. We are also providing sample datasets for
people to work on during the datathon, or they are happy to use their own.
Included datasets are:

* the .gov web archive covering the American government domain
* the End of Term Web Archives (.gov/.mil), from 2008, 2012, and 2016
* social media collectios from the 2016 archive
* Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups collection
* and other datasets to be announced

We will also have datasets from the Internet Archive's recent event
available, some noted above and the rest available at
http://blog.archive.org/2017/01/02/join-us-for-a-white-
house-social-media-and-gov-data-hackathon/.

Those interested in participating should send a 250-word expression of
interest and a CV to Matthew Weber (matthew.weber at rutgers.edu) by 20
January 2017 with “Archives Unleashed” in the subject line. This expression
of interest should address the scholarly questions that you will be
bringing to the datathon, and what datasets you might be interested in
either working with or bringing to the event. Applicants will be notified
by 25 January 2017.

We expect to be able to issue a limited number of travel grants available
for US-based graduate students; preference will be given to those who have
not participated in the Archives Unleashed program in the past, although we
welcome returning participants. These grants can cover up to $750 in
expenses. If you are in an eligible position, please indicate in your
statement of interest that you would like to be considered for the travel
grant.

On behalf of the organizers,

Matthew Weber (Rutgers University), Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo),
Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo)


-- 
*Ian Milligan*
Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave W.
Waterloo ON N2L 3G1 Canada
http://ianmilligan.ca
@ianmilligan1 <https://twitter.com/ianmilligan1>



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