Internet Archives Research Spotlighted at WIRE Workshop

July 14, 2014
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IQSS hosted the first Working with Internet Archives for Research (WIRE) Workshop on June 17 and 18. The workshop was co-organized by IQSS affiliate David Lazer (Northeastern Univ.), Matthew Weber (Rutgers Univ.), and Kris Carpenter Negulescu (Internet Archive). Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the WIRE Workshop focused on working with internet archives for research. Lazer and Weber highlighted work that their teams have been doing to develop new tools for extracting data from the Internet Archive. The research group currently possesses more than 25 terabytes of data that has been transferred from the Internet Archive in order to advance research.

The conference brought WIRE Workshoptogether 35 leading scholars from around the globe to address the theoretical and technical challenges associated with utilizing archival Internet data for the purposes of research. The conference was organized across two days; the first day was open to the public, and focused on presenting research completed to date. Lazer opened the conference with an overview of the event, and presentations were given by Weber, as well as from scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute (Oxford, UK), the Center for Internet Studies (Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark), and the L3S Research Centre (University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany). The second day focused on breakout sessions around theory development, technical challenges and historical research associated with Internet archives. The breakout sessions helped to set the agenda for a white paper that is due to be published in August. Additional presentations were given by Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland, Poong Oh and Peter Monge, University of Southern California, and Ed Fox at Virginia Tech.

The WIRE Workshop was hosted by IQSS and organized in collaboration with the Internet Archive, Rutgers NetSCI Lab, and NULab. The Internet Archive offers permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Network Science Research Lab at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information focuses on the study of organizations and communities across multiple levels of interaction, connecting theory to practice, and informing the design of networks in everyday life. NULab, Northeastern University’s center for digital humanities and computational social science, supports faculty research, trains graduate students, and provides fora for discussions of technology, teaching, and research at Northeastern.

by Matthew Weber (Rutgers University) & Elizabeth Salazar