Hi all,

Please find this call for participation below. This datathon is part of
a broader "Web Archiving Week," to be held in London between June 11th
and 16th. You can see more details about that here:
http://netpreserve.org/general-assembly/2017/overview.

Any questions, please do let us know!

-Nick

Call for Participation: Archives Unleashed 4.0
Web Archive Datathon
http://archivesunleashed.com
The British Library

June 11 – 13, 2017
Travel grants will be available for US-based graduate students.

Applications for all attendees are due 31 March 2017.

Call for Participation
This event is the fourth workshop in the Archives Unleashed series. Each
event is a standalone datathon aimed at building the Web Archiving
community and providing a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration.

The World Wide Web has a profound impact on how we research and
understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is
generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form,
presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this
information is captured within web archives.

Web archives often contain hundreds of billions of web pages, ranging
from individual homepages and social media posts, to institutional
websites. These archives offer tremendous potential for social
scientists and humanists, and the questions research may pose stretch
across a multitude of fields. Scholars broaching topics dating back to
the mid-1990s will find their projects enhanced by web data. Moreover,
scholars hoping to study the evolution of cultural and societal
phenomena will find a treasure trove of data in web archives. In short,
web archives offer the ability to reconstruct large-scale traces of the
relatively recent past.

While there has been considerable discussion about web archive tools and
datasets, few forums or mechanisms for coordinated, mutually informing
development efforts have been created. Our series of datathons presents
an opportunity to collaboratively unleash our web collections, exploring
cutting-edge research tools while fostering a broad-based consensus on
future directions in web archive analysis.

This event will bring together a small group of 35 – 45 participants to
collaboratively develop new open-source tools and approaches to web
archives, and to kick-off collaboratively inspired research projects.
Researchers should be comfortable with command line interactions, and
knowledge of a scripting language (such as but not limited to Python) is
strongly desired. By bringing together a group of like-minded scholars
and programmers, we hope to begin building unified analytic production
effort and to continue coalescing this nascent research community.

At this event, we hope to continue to converge on a shared vision of
future directions in the use of web archives for inquiry in the
humanities and social sciences in order to build a community of practice
around various web archive analytics platforms and tools.

The event is sponsored by the British Library (lead sponsor), Rutgers
University, University of Waterloo, the National Science Foundation and
the International Internet Preservation Consortium. In addition, there
will be a reception the first night and a dinner the second night,
supported by funding from the NetLab at Aarhus University, the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Rutgers University.

We are also providing sample datasets for people to work on during the
datathon, or they are happy to use their own. Included datasets are:

• The .gov web archive covering the American government domain
• The End of Term Web Archives (.gov/.mil), from 2008, 2012, and 2016
• Social media collections from the 2016 archive
• Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups collection
and other datasets to be announced

Those interested in participating should send a 250-word expression of
interest and a CV to Ian Milligan ([log in to unmask]) by 7 April
2017 with “Archives Unleashed” in the subject line. This expression of
interest should address the scholarly questions that you will be
bringing to the datathon, and what datasets you might be interested in
either working with or bringing to the event. Applicants will be
notified by 15 April 2017.

We expect to be able to issue a limited number of travel grants
available for US-based doctoral students; preference will be given to
those who have not participated in the Archives Unleashed program in the
past, although we welcome returning participants. These grants can cover
up to $1,000 USD in expenses. If you are in an eligible position, please
indicate in your statement of interest that you would like to be
considered for the travel grant.

On behalf of the organizers,

Matthew Weber (Rutgers University), Ian Milligan (University of
Waterloo), Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo), and Olga Holownia
(British Library/IIPC).

-nruest

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