A tale of two web archives: Challenges of engaging web archival infrastructures for research

paper, specified "short paper"
Authorship
  1. 1. Jessica Ogden

    University of Southampton

  2. 2. Emily Maemura

    University of Toronto

Work text
This plain text was ingested for the purpose of full-text search, not to preserve original formatting or readability. For the most complete copy, refer to the original conference program.

Web archival collections are a key source for historical web research, and recent anthologies have provided examples of their use by researchers from a wide range of disciplines including the Digital Humanities. This paper explores the challenges of researcher engagement with web archives from the vantage point of two national web archives: the UK Web Archive at the British Library, and Netarkivet at the Royal Danish Library. We compare and contrast our experiences of undertaking web archival research at these institutions. Our personal interactions with the collections are supplemented by interviews and observations of the everyday practices of archivists, with a view towards understanding the similar yet different circumstances that shape researcher engagement in web archives. This analysis facilitates a discussion of the ways in which web archival interfaces both enable and foreclose on particular forms of research and contributes to critical ongoing debates surrounding digital source criticism in DH.

If this content appears in violation of your intellectual property rights, or you see errors or omissions, please reach out to Scott B. Weingart to discuss removing or amending the materials.

Conference Info

In review

ADHO - 2020
"carrefours / intersections"

Hosted at Carleton University, Université d'Ottawa (University of Ottawa)

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

July 20, 2020 - July 25, 2020

475 works by 1078 authors indexed

Conference cancelled due to coronavirus. Online conference held at https://hcommons.org/groups/dh2020/. Data for this conference were initially prepared and cleaned by May Ning.

Conference website: https://dh2020.adho.org/

References: https://dh2020.adho.org/abstracts/

Series: ADHO (15)

Organizers: ADHO