Earlier this year, the Archives Unleashed Project announced the Cohort Program, which aims to support web archives research by providing resource support and mentorship. Starting in July, cohorts will engage in collaborative activities and conduct focused research that explores a variety of web archive collections.

We are pleased to introduce the five teams that will make up our inaugural Cohort program.

AWAC2 — Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset

Valérie Schafer, University of Luxembourg (LU)

Karin De Wild, Leiden University (NL)

Frédéric Clavert, University of Luxembourg (LU)

Niels Brügger, Aarhus University (DK)

Susan…

As North America heads into the 15th month of the COVID pandemic, we are all too aware of the depth and breadth of impacts the pandemic has had on every sector.

In March 2020, our project planned to host our final datathon event at Columbia University, New York, NY. Having monitored ever-growing outbreaks and witnessing the domino effect of cancelled scholarly events, the team proactively shifted our event online.

In reflecting on this experience, our open-access article, Building community at a distance: A datathon during COVID-19, discusses the implications around transitioning events online, provides practice recommendations to event organizers, and…

By: Archives Unleashed and project collaborators

Web archives play a critical role for scholars studying the 1990s onwards. However, gaps in available analytics tools, community infrastructure, and accessible web archival interfaces present high barriers for conducting research with web archives at scale.

Established in 2017 with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Archives Unleashed Project developed open-source analytical tools, community resources, and hosted collaborative learning events to address researcher challenges of accessing, using, and exploring web archives. The marquee product of this first phase was the Archives Unleashed Cloud.

This work continues apace in a second phase (2020–2023)…

Written by Samantha Fritz (Project Manager, Archives Unleashed Project) on behalf of the Archives Unleashed team.

This piece has been cross-posted with the International Internet Preservation Consortium Blog.

The web archiving world blends the work and contributions of many institutions, groups, projects, and individuals. The field is witnessing work and progress in many areas, from policies, to professional development and learning resources, to the development of tools that address replay, acquisition, and analysis.

For over two decades memory institutions and organizations around the world have engaged in web archiving to ensure the preservation of born-digital content that is vital to…

Fostering Community Engagement through Datathon Events: The Archives Unleashed Experience

Our recent-open access article “Fostering Community Engagement through Datathon Events: The Archives Unleashed Experience,” published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, takes a reflective look at the impact of Archives Unleashed Datathons on the professional practices of attendees and community engagement within the web archiving field.

Datathons have been a center-piece of the Archives Unleashed Project’s community engagement efforts. Our four events held as part of our Mellon-funded project engaged with over 70 participants from over fifty different institutions, offering hands-on training with analytical tools to explore web archives.

Our article introduces…

Engaging with the Canadian Web Archiving Coalition

Earlier this year, Archives Unleashed had an opportunity to engage with a Canadian-based group focusing on web archiving support for practitioners and researchers. The Canadian Web Archiving Coalition (CWAC) is a community that brings together libraries, archives, and other memory institutions across Canada that engage with web archiving. CWAC is part of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), which focuses on “identifying gaps and opportunities that could be addressed by nationally coordinated strategies, actions, and services, including collaborative collection development, training, infrastructure development.” (1)

The launch of the World Wide Web created…

Introduction

We have lots of web archival data — but what to do with it? The web archiving ecosystem has many organizations, institutions, projects, and individuals who have captured terabytes of data. These important preservation efforts allow us to explore the recent past. Web archive collections are a critical source for documenting, and in turn studying, our ever-growing online world. We don’t have to look too far back to see how born-digital collections illustrate important social and cultural movements, global health events, and various national elections, such as #MeToo, COVID, or #BlackLivesMatter.

We can see that web archives inform fields…

From Archive to Analysis: Access Web Archives at Scale Through a Cloud-Based Interface

In a recently published article, “From Archive to Analysis: Access Web Archives at Scale Through a Cloud-Based Interface,” co-authors Nick Ruest, Samantha Fritz, Ryan Deschamps, Jimmy Lin, and Ian Milligan propose that by moving towards a cloud-based architecture for web archiving analysis, many of the challenges of web archive research can be partially addressed — leaving opportunities for scholars, as well as the broader web archiving community.

We examine how scholars use web archives, emphasizing these usage models do not line up with the existing command-line and…