Events

Archives Unleashed Events

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.

Cognizant that funded project run into sustainability issues following a successful launch, our team has prioritized community building engaging researchers through a series of datathon events.

Datathons provided an opportunity to build a sustainable community around Archives Unleashed tools, scholarly discussion, and training for scholars with limited technical expertise to explore archived web content.

Upcoming Research Opportunities

We are currently running the second iteration of the Archives Unleashed Cohort Program to support and facilitate continued engagement with web archives. Research teams will participate in a year-long collaboration while receiving mentorship and support from the Archives Unleashed Team.

Visit the program pages Cohort 2021-2022 and Cohort 2022-2023 for full details.

Past Datathons

Our datathon model brings together researchers, programmers, visualization experts, memory institutional professionals and others to collaboratively work with web collections and explore cutting-edge research tools through hands-on experience.

The Archives Unleashed team has had the pleasure of hosting several datathons. Follow the event pages below to learn more about each datathon, including projects completed by attendees.

As part of this Andrew W. Mellon funded project, we have hosted four events:

Date	Location	Hosts	Event Page
26-27 April 2018	Toronto, ON, Canada	University of Toronto Libraries	Toronto Datathon Page
1-2 November 2018	Vancouver, BC, Canda	Simon Fraser University Library & KEY	Vancouver Datathon Page
21-22 March 2019	Washington, DC, USA	George Washington University Libraries	Washington Datathon Page
26-27 March 2020	New York City, NY, USA (ONLINE)	Columbia University Libraries	New York Datathon Page
14-15 May 2020	Montreal, QB, Canada	BAnQ & IIPC	[CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19]

A series of events pre-dates our Andrew W. Mellon funded Archives Unleashed project:

Date	Location		Event Page
March 2016	Toronto, ON, Canada	Robarts Library, University of Toronto Libraries	Archives Unleashed 1.0: Web Archive Hackathon
June 2016	Washington, DC, USA	Library of Congress	Archives Unleashed 2.0: Library of Congress
February 2017	San Francisco, CA, USA	Internet Archive	Archives Unleashed 3.0: Internet Archive
June 2017	London, UK	British Library	Archives Unleashed 4.0: British Invasion!