Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and HumanitiesJane 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 1996-2013

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