This document summarizes a discussion around using web archives for historical research. Key points discussed include: 1) Historians are interested in using web archives for research but find it difficult due to technical challenges and a lack of necessary skills and resources. 2) Questions were raised around whether to create new research corpora from web archives or use existing ones, and how to ensure sources are properly contextualized. 3) An idea was proposed to focus historical research on the period of 1995-2000 using around 20TB of data from the Internet Archive along with other datasets, in order to better understand this formative early period of the web. 4) Developing tools and community resources could help address historians

1. Breakout #3:
Historical Research
Ian Milligan (in the hot seat today), Stephen Robertson,
Thomas Risse, Kris Carpenter Negulescu, Pamela
Graham, Niels Brügger, Ivana Marenzi, Katie Kang (thanks
for the notes!), Ed Fox, Meghan Dougherty, Matt Connolley

2. What we did? (I think)
• Tackled some big problems/questions
• Explored what historians and others might want to
do with this material
• Thought about community building..
• And came up with a tangible path forward!

3. First big problem we
discussed about
historians..

5. Building Interest?
• Eric Meyer: rooms were “thin on the ground”
• Internet Archive needs to be viewed from many
different perspectives
• CS doing their way, historians their own, Internet
researchers their own, etc.
• Historians are interested, but get FRUSTRATED
quickly when they realize how hard their tasks are

6. Building Interest?
• Problem is that historians trained in a particular
way, but this offers a new way (the shift from
scarcity to abundance)
• And really important to emphasize the
QUESTIONS that we have. Can’t just study the
web, have to have reasons to do so.

7. First big question
• Should we create new research corpuses, or use
existing ones?!
• Should we make research corpuses ourselves?
• What moment are we at now?

8. Second problem
• Technical ones
• Historians are interested, but too hard to answer
questions because we don’t have enough
technical ability, resources, etc., to do it this way.
• How to effect collaboration? (apparently being
in a room together helps)!
• How can we contextualize documents? How do
we avoid viewing them as decontextualized?

9. Distant/Close
• Ideal is a way to move between distant and close,
but not always there (though some awesome
examples today!)
• Discussion about whether historians will even care
about domain-level studies
• So much emphasis on network studies, etc., which
may be of limited utility to humanists like historians
(or at the very least, need to be complemented by
more qualitative forms of research)

10. Too much information, so
what can we do?

11. Lots of other problems
• How do we deal with the big bang of electronic
records (starting in the 1970s)?
• How much data is there (we could compare Google
index/Altavista etc) to come here?
• What about emulation when it comes to digital
preservation - using old browsers, etc.? Should we
use virtual machines?

12. Community Building
• IIPC has no overlap with AoIR
• Live web scholars don’t deal with archived web
scholars, no community!
• How could we build a better community?
• Are people seeing themselves reflected in these
communities?

13. How quickly can this
happen?
• Will it take generations?
• Or will it come quicker?

14. Final Outcome
• Could we have a history of the 1990s without using
web archives?!
• How could we harness web archives to tell the story
of 1995 through 2005? First decade of material?
• Or just 1995-2000 due to manageability of this dataset.!
• Sort of a sweet spot - manageable data - before the
rise of closed off social media, etc. A good way to sell
the utility of these archives!

15. Idea
• Reach out to other datasets and archives
• Pick data from 1995-2000 from Internet Archive
(~20TB) and build tools, ask questions, etc.!
• Look at different strands (.gov data), GeoCities,
news data, e-mails, digital records, etc.
• Cool factoid: Herman Miller invented the idea of
‘cube farm,’ if you do term search you can see it
rise with the early web.

16. Idea
• Some name ideas:
• History 2.0
• History in the Digital Age
• Polarization
• End of Millennium (1995-2000) Historical Studies
• End of Millennium (1995-2000) Studies

17. NIST (National Institute of Standards and
Technology) TREC (Text Retrieval
Conference) TRAK Idea
• Sources for the following:
• IA collections
• BYU, Corpus of Contemporary American English,
wide range of digitized resources
• Related collections from UK, Germany

18. NIST TREC Track for End of
Millennium (1995-2000) Studies
• To be proposed and led by Jimmy Lin
• IA and others provide <30TB of content
• Historians and provide an initial set of questions and
tasks (e.g., spread of polarization), for which they have
ground truth, from other sources
• Researchers materialize systems that can handle those
• Final competition: historians pose new questions and
tasks and research groups submit results for analysis