Web archive research in an age of Smart Data

The web represents the largest unstructured data collection, with a huge variety of data types, creators and sources, distributed across the world. The archived web introduces a further dimension of temporality, with national web archives also bringing questions of space to the fore. 

Hear from our panellists about their research using the archived web and join us for a discussion about the latest methods for examining archived web data, including computational analysis, data visualisation and tools for finding the human stories in the archived web.

This event is in partnership with ‘An Atlas of Economic Activities in the UK’, a Smart Data Research UK project, which uses web archive data from Common Crawl to analyse and map economic activity. Speakers include project lead Emmanouil Tranos and Thom Vaughan from the Common Crawl foundation. They are joined by Andrea Kocsis and Cameron Huggett. Andrea’s exhibition Digital Ghosts (Edinburgh, 5 – 16 November) visualises UK Web Archive data from the National Library of Scotland. Cameron’s research into football fan publications, racism and anti-racism has included close reading of online football fan community forums as preserved in web archives. Our chair is Jane Winters, Director of the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the University of London.

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