Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Jane Winters (Professor of Digital History, Institute of Historical Research) IIPC General Assembly Open Conference, 27 April 2015

AHRC Big Data Call Part of the Digital Transformations theme Aim to address the challenges of working with big data A total of 21 projects funded A number of large-scale collaborative projects, of which BUDDAH is one

Project partners Institute of Historical Research – Jonathan Blaney and Jane Winters British Library – Helen Hockx-Yu, Andy Jackson and Peter Webster Oxford Internet Institute – Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder and Josh Cowls Aarhus University – Niels Brügger

Aims To highlight the value of web archives for research To develop a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of web archives To explore the ethical implications of big data research To inform collections development and access arrangements at the British Library To train researchers in the use of big data

Project outputs An enhanced interface providing access to the data at the British Library An open-access monograph: The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present (UCL Press) An online training module Two short animations explaining web archives to the general public A series of case studies presenting research using the archive

Case studies I 10 bursaries of £2,000 each Range of arts and humanities disciplines Open to researchers in universities, libraries, archives and museums, as well as independent researchers Work with developers at the British Library to co- create the tools and interface Produce a case study of at least 2,000 words

Case studies II The UK Web Archive and Beat literature Online reactions to institutional crises: BBC Online A history of UK companies on the web Digital barriers and the accessible web Searching for home in the historic web – the blogs of the London-French

Case studies III Revealing British Euro-scepticism in the UK Web Archive Looking for public archaeology in the Web Archive Do online networks exist for the poetry community? Capture, commemoration and the citizen historian The online development of the Ministry of Defence

What do researchers want? An interface which supports sophisticated query building The ability to create and manipulate corpora derived from the larger dataset Tools to support annotation and curation of data Tools for basic data analysis, both across the whole dataset and within smaller corpora Guidance on the ethical implications of their research And above all, they want to know what is going on behind the scenes

Common problems Messiness, even ‘unknowability’, of the data Inability to distinguish between content types within a web page Discomfort with the idea of ‘good enough’ for purpose Over-reliance on approaches conditioned by algorithmically-ranked search Lack of training in quantitative methods

Acknowledgements Project team – Jonathan Blaney, Niels Brügger, Josh Cowls, Helen Hockx-Yu, Andrew Jackson, Eric Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, Jason Webber, Peter Webster Bursary holders – Rowan Aust, Rona Cran, Richard Deswarte, Saskia Huc-Hepher, Alison Kay, Gareth Millward, Marta Musso, Harry Raffal, Lorna Richardson, Helen Taylor