Abstract
Our work considers the sociotechnical and organisational constraints of web archiving in order to understand how these factors and contingencies influence research engagement with national web collections. In this article, we compare and contrast our experiences of undertaking web archival research at two national web archives: the UK Web Archive located at the British Library and the Netarchive at the Royal Danish Library. Based on personal interactions with the collections, interviews with library staff and observations of web archiving activities, we invoke three conceptual devices (orientating, auditing and constructing) to describe common research practices and associated challenges in the context of each national web archive. Through this framework we centre the early stages of the research process that are often only given cursory attention in methodological descriptions of web archival research, to discuss the epistemological entanglements of researcher practices, instruments, tools and methods that create the conditions of possibility for new knowledge and scholarship in this space. In this analysis, we highlight the significant time and energy required on the part of researchers to begin using national web archives, as well as the value of engaging with the curatorial infrastructure that enables web archiving in practice. Focusing an analysis on these research infrastructures facilitates a discussion of how these web archival interfaces both enable and foreclose on particular forms of researcher engagement with the past Web and in turn contributes to critical ongoing debates surrounding the opportunities and constraints of digital sources, methodologies and claims within the Digital Humanities.
Highlights
Web archives have become a key source for web-based research and recent anthologies provide examples of their use in a wide range of disciplines, including Digital Humanities research (Brügger, 2017; Brügger & Laursen, 2019; Brügger & Schroeder, 2017; Milligan, 2019)
To engage with tools and interfaces to analyse data directly. We characterise this set of activities through a conceptual framework that attends to the entanglement of epistemic practices, legal restrictions and the software used to enable harvesting, curation and user access
Whereas the existence and promotion of research programmes, ‘datathons’ and workshops have worked towards providing introductory or general use tools for analysing web archives, we propose that enrolling DH and digital social science scholars in web archival research via this framework facilitates necessary knowledge about how to engage with curatorial infrastructure, what questions to ask and what resources beyond a collection’s ‘data’ may structure the research design process
Summary
Web archives have become a key source for web-based research and recent anthologies provide examples of their use in a wide range of disciplines, including Digital Humanities research (Brügger, 2017; Brügger & Laursen, 2019; Brügger & Schroeder, 2017; Milligan, 2019). Much of this work has drawn on large-scale collections, with a particular focus on the use of national web archives. While this scholarship demonstrates how web archives afford new opportunities for digital research, they have identified a persistent ‘sociotechnical gap’ (Ackerman, 2000) between the needs of researchers and the affordances of current web archival research infrastructures - a problem neatly summarised by Lepore:. Though Lepore notes a lack of search and discovery tools, in recent years strides have been made to further the academic use of web archives through the creation of programmes and open source software, including faceted search interfaces for largescale collections like ArchiveSpark and those developed by the Archives Unleashed Project.. Despite a recent upswing in international research initiatives focused on these analysis tools, many significant challenges remain
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