Reply to this post | Go Back

View Post [edit]

Poster:	Alison OK	Date:	May 13, 2019 2:37pm
Forum:	news	Subject:	Historians.org: Data Overload- Web Archives and the Challenges of Scale

Imagine future historians studying the public discourse on autism in the early 21st century. They sift through an archive as vast as anything we know today, but they must contend with born-digital sources—blogs written by people with autism, for example, or the websites of advocacy organizations and government agencies, not to mention video, audio, and social media content, all gathered from across the web. The extent of this archive means that the traditional methods of doing historical research will no longer be relevant, at least for this project. Historians will have to use new techniques and digital tools to interrogate the archive. The scale of pertinent sources, the technical skills required to analyze them, and the need to assess what was and wasn’t collected by the archivists who processed these materials in the first place will raise a host of challenges. Read full text.
This post was modified by Caitlin Olson on 2019-05-13 21:37:28
This post was modified by Caitlin Olson on 2019-05-13 21:37:50