The continually-growing volume of cultural heritage held in web archives is a vast resource awaiting the use of researchers in fields as varied as history, political science, sociology, and computer science. While web archives have been collected and saved since 1996, scholarly use has lagged due to the sheer scale of the data that confronts potential users. In this talk, Ian Milligan argues that interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together librarians, computer scientists, and historians, holds the best pathway forward. Drawing on varied case studies, from explorations of 1990s youth culture to comparing the archived websites of Obama and Trump, Milligan highlights efforts to unlock web archives for historical research.
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About Ian Milligan:
Ian Milligan is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, where he teaches Canadian and digital history. Ian's work explores how historians can use web archives, the large repositories of cultural information that the Internet Archive and many other libraries have been collecting since 1996. He has published two books: the co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (2015) and Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada (2014). In 2016, Ian was named the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN)’s recipient of the Outstanding Early Career Award.