Sorry for eventual x-posting.
It might be relevant to this list.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [Air-L] Extended Deadline - Final Call: Archives Unleashed 2.0
- Web Archive Hackathon
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:26:50 -0400
From: Matthew Weber <matthew.weber(a)rutgers.edu>
To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org
***Call for Participation*** ***Deadline Extended to March 21***
Archives Unleashed 2.0: Web Archive Datathon
Library of Congress, Washington DC
14 – 15 June 2016
Travel grants available for US-based graduate students; additional funding will be
available for international participants
Applications due March 21 2016
http://www.archivesunleashed.com
**This event is a follow-up to the Archives Unleashed datathon held in March at the
University of Toronto Library. With generous funding from the National Science Foundation
and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada), we’ve been able to extend
the datathon program, and are excited to bring this program to the Library of Congress.**
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. This hackathon 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 hackathon will bring together a small group of 20-30 participants to collaboratively
develop new open-source tools and approaches to hackathon, and to kick-off collaboratively
inspired research projects. Researchers should be comfortable with command line
interactions, and knowledge of a scripting language such as Python 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 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.
Thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Waterloo’s Department of History,
the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and the University of Waterloo, and the
School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, we will cover all meals and
refreshments for attendees. We are also providing sample datasets for people to work on
during the hackathon, or they are happy to use their own. Included datasets are:
• the .gov web archive covering the American government domain
• Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups collection
Those interested in participating should send a 250-word expression of interest and a CV
to Matthew Weber (matthew.weber(a)rutgers.edu) by March 21 2016 with “Archives Unleashed” in
the subject line. This expression of interest should address the scholarly questions that
you will be bringing to the hackathon, and what datasets you might be interested in either
working with or bringing to the event. Applicants will be notified by March 30 2016.
We have a limited number of travel grants available for graduate 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 $750 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. A letter of support from your graduate
supervisor will also strengthen your application.
On behalf of the organizers,
Matthew Weber (Rutgers University), Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo), Jimmy Lin
(University of Waterloo)
Matthew S. Weber
matthew.weber(a)rutgers.edu
Assistant Professor
School of Communication and Information
http://www.matthewsweber.com
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