World Wide Web of Humanities
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This project established a framework for e‐Humanities (also called digital humanities) research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content. The project created novel research interfaces to the first of many scholarly e‐Humanities web collections.
Executive Summary
The World Wide Web is enormous and is in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live Web. The growing body of archived web material available to researchers is immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society. But, there are few tools available to facilitate research using archived web materials. Humanities researchers are expected to individually assemble research data and e‐Research tools needed for analysis. This can be cost‐prohibitive in terms of resources and time, and more importantly can dissuade researchers from undertaking relevant research simply due to the technical barriers involved.
This one‐year project addressed this gap by establishing a framework for e‐Humanities (also called digital humanities) research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content. The project created novel research interfaces to the first of many scholarly e‐Humanities web collections. Within the context of this project, the term ‘web collections’ was used to describe collections of archived websites and ‘born digital’ content.
During the 12-months of the World Wide Web of Humanities project, the project team assembled two collections of websites focused on World Wars I & II, drawn primarily from the Internet Archive and enhanced with new crawls to complete the collections. These sample collections were compiled to help illustrate researcher needs and requirements, and in anticipation of further development of tools for working with the very large volumes of data housed by digital archives such as the Internet Archive. The team identified a range of research questions that such archival web collections could be expected to be used to answer, from the point of view of humanities scholars, of internet researchers, and of programmers who work with web archives. These research questions were then used to inform the design and implementation of search tools and collection interfaces.
The key goals of the project have been successfully met, and we have made a number of relevant observations based on this experience that will be of great value to similar efforts in the future.
Among the key lessons learned from this research project are:
- The importance of including participants with a strong personal research interest in developing a given collection will be key in future efforts, as this involvement enhances the likelihood of having user‐friendly collections and interfaces. Collections that are built with strong involvement of a champion or community with domain expertise can, for instance, speed the curation stage of similar projects.
- Available tools to facilitate e‐humanities research are still either too hard to use, i.e. they require collaboration with an engineer, or they are missing entirely from the workflow limiting options for the creation of a user friendly platform easy enough for non‐technical humanities researchers to adopt and use on a regular basis. Based on the findings and experience gained in this project, it is now clearer which direction these efforts will need to take.