Scholarly access and beyond: WebART activities in early 2013
Post date: Sep 17, 2013 12:2:0 PM
It has been quiet on our news page for a short while, but this certainly does not imply that nothing happened. In this post we summarize the events that took place in the months following the NWO-CATCH meeting hosted by WebART.
IIPC General Assembly 2013 (25-26 April, 2013)
On the 25th of April, 2013 we headed for Ljubljana, Slovenia and presented at the symposium “Scholarly Access to Web Archives: Progress, Requirements and Challenges”. This day, organized by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), was dedicated to scholarly access to Web archives in a broad sense, and included presentations by Niels Brügger, Meghan Dougherty, Helen Hockx-Yu and Julien Masanès. Our presentation “WebART: Facilitating Scholarly Use Of Web Archives” discussed the potential of scholarly research using Web archives, as well as current barriers to success, based on the experiences gained during the pilot project of WebART.
ACM Web Science 2013 (2-4 May, 2013)
The experience of applying the tools developed by the WebART project to a research setting was also documented in a full paper for the ACM Web Science 2013 conference. The “Palais des Congres” in Paris, France was the venue for the conference in early May, which included a keynote by Vint Cerf, the “godfather of the internet”, and interesting presentations by academics from a wide range of disciplines. Our paper, ”Sprint Methods for Web Archive Research” was presented as a poster at the conference, resulting in a useful variety of (interdisciplinary) discussions about Web archiving and our project.
flickr: MDP01605 (CC-BY)
Scholarly use of Web archives: studying Israeli politics on the Web (28-30 May, 2013)
An indication that the tools and methods developed by the WebART project are not only useful in the context of the Dutch Web, but also in other settings, was provided during the workshop “Scholarly Use of Web Archives: Studying Israeli Politics on the Web”. This event consisted of a conference and workshop, organized by the program for Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University, the National Library of Israel, and the Digital Humanities Incubator. It addressed new methods for scholarly use of Web archives, while paying attention to special collections of election campaigns. A group of 12 participants from different disciplines made use of the WebART search tools, applied to Israeli Web archives of the elections in 2009 and 2013. The participants of the workshop provided ample feedback on the pilot system of WebART, and new inspiration for the creation of the next generation of Web archive search systems. Talks from this conference are available here.
