World Wide Web of Humanities
This project has now finished, and there are two websites available to search over the huge collection of websites relating to WW1 and WW2 that this project has collected. The Internet Archives website allow for general searches, whilst the Hanzo Archives website adds some specific tools that will be of interest to the e-humanities researcher.
There is also an API to allow queries to be run over the collection.
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 is little, if any, supporting infrastructure, processes and trusted methods available to facilitate domain specific Internet research. 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.
This project has begun to address 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 to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections. Two research collections were assembled around World War 1 and World War 2, as a way to build and test the tools constructed.
Within the context of this proejct, the term "web collections" is used to describe collections of archived web sites. Both the Internet Archive and Hanzo have extensive experience in web archiving, and are prominent players internationally in the creation of web collections, including the largest of all web collections, the Internet Archive’s Web collection accessible via the WayBack Machine.
The World Wide Web of Humanities is funded under the JISC/NEH transatlantic digitisation collaborative grants programme, part of the JISC digitisation programme.
The Final Report (pdf) is available to download
The project plan is available as a Pdf document.
Partner sites: Oxford Internet Institute, the University of Oxford, and the Internet Archive