Building Community and Tools for Analyzing Web Archives through Datathons

Abstract

Starting in March 2016, the Archives Unleashed team and our collaborators have brought together social scientists, humanists, archivists, librarians, computer scientists, and other stakeholders to explore web archives as research objects. Three objectives motivated our team to develop and organize these events: facilitating scholarly access, community building, and skills training. We believe that we have been successful on all three fronts. For each event, over the course of two to three days, participants formed interdisciplinary teams and explored web archives using a variety of methods and tools. This paper details our experiences in designing these "datathons", with an intent to share lessons learned, highlight interdisciplinary approaches to research and education on web archives, and describe future opportunities.