The Archives Unleashed Notebook: Madlibs for Jumpstarting Scholarly Exploration

Abstract

This paper introduces the Archives Unleashed Notebook, which is designed to work with derivative datasets from the Archives Unleashed Cloud, a platform for analyzing web archives. These datasets contain common starting points for scholarly inquiry, including full text content and the domain-level webgraph. Our notebooks interactively walk a scholar through the process of interrogating a collection using a fill-in-the-blanks 'madlibs' approach to promote engagement. Scholars start with a notebook populated with common analyses, in which they can make minor changes to variables to alter the subject of study in systematic ways.