OPPORTUNITY: Archives Unleashed Datathon

Archives Unleashed, an Andrew W. Mellon funded initiative which aims make petabytes of historical internet content accessible researchers, has announced its fourth datathon to take place 26-27 March 2020.

From the call for participation:

The World Wide Web has had 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.

The project team invites archivists, researchers (from the humanities, social sciences, and beyond), librarians, computer scientists, and web archiving enthusiasts to join us over the course of two days to collaboratively work with web collections and explore cutting-edge research tools through hands-on experience.

The Archives Unleashed Team has partnered with Columbia University Libraries to host the fourth Archives Unleashed datathon.

This event will bring together a small group of approximately 15-20 participants to experiment with the newest release of the Archives Unleashed Toolkit and Cloud, and to kick-off collaboratively inspired research projects. Participants will have access to analytics software and specialists, and will be exposed to the process of working with web archive files at scale.

This event is sponsored by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University Libraries, University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts, York University Libraries, and Compute Canada. Modest travel grants (up to $1,000 USD) will be made available to help attendees participate in this event.

Submissions are due to the Archives Unleashed Team (sam.fritz@archivesunleashed.org) by midnight (EST) on 1 November 2019, and applicants will be notified by 12 November 2019.