A few months ago, a colleague suggested that we should come up with ways of helping people learn about the main stages of web archiving, and to help them understand some of the more common technical terminology.
As a computational physicist working in a library, my background and training is quite different to the curators and researchers I now work with. Therefore, I do try to spend some time following developments in the digital humanities more generally, trying to understand the kinds of questions being asked, the techniques that are being used, and the assumptions that lie beneath.
I gave the following presentation at the 2015 IIPC GA. If you prefer, you can read the rough script with slides (below the fold) rather than watch the video.
Following Vint Cerf’s talk at AAAS, the “Digital Dark Age” is in the news again (see DSHR’s blog for a good summary, or one of the ~200 other news articles about it!). The coverage spun me into a Twitter rant (documented here), but after reflecting on my reaction, I feel it’s worth exploring the issues in a bit more detail…
Over the last year, we have been a part of the Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project, with the ambitious goal of building a ‘historical search engine’ covering the early history of the UK web. This continues the work of the Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive project but at a greater scale, and moreover, with a much more challenging range of use cases.