[ecrea] Call for Participation: Archives Unleashed 2.0 - Web Archive Datathon

****Call for Participation****
*
Archives Unleashed 2.0: Web Archive Datahon

Library of Congress, Washington DC
14 – 15 June 2016
_Travel grants available for US-based graduate students; other travel
funding may be available
Applications due 15 March 2016_*

**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 /at/ rutgers.edu)
<mailto:(matthew.weber /at/ rutgers.edu)>) by 15 March 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 25 March 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

Assistant Professor
School of Communication and Information
http://www.matthewsweber.com

Co-Director
NetSci Network Science Lab
http://netsci.rutgers.edu

Rutgers University







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