World Wide Web of Humanities

April 2008 - March 2009

Participants

• Dr Robert Ackland, Australian National University (ANU)

• Professor William H. Dutton, Oxford Internret Institute

• Christine Madsen, Oxford Internet Institute

• Dr Eric T. Meyer (Principal Investigator), Oxford Internet Institute

• Dr Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute

Abstract

The World Wide Web is enormous and is in constant flux, with more web content lost to time than is currently accessible via the live Web. The growing body of archived web material available to researchers is immensely valuable as a record of important aspects of modern society, but there is little, if any, supporting infrastructure, processes and trusted methods available to facilitate domain specific Internet research. Humanities researchers are expected to individually assemble research data and e-Research tools needed for analysis. This can be cost-prohibitive in terms of resources and time.

This project aims to begin to address this gap by establishing a framework for e-Humanities (also called Digital Humanities) research using available open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.

Within the context of this project, the term 'web collections' is used to describe collections of archived websites. Both the Internet Archive and Hanzo have extensive experience in web archiving, and are prominent players internationally in the creation of web collections, including the largest of all web collections, the Internet Archive’s Web collection accessible via the WayBack Machine.

Final collections

• NEH World Wide Web of Humanities: World War I and II - a comprehensive collection of archived humanities research websites on World War I and World War II.

• Demonstration of Hanzo Archive's Search Tools

Presentation slides

• Slides from Humanities on the Web: Is it working? (19 March 2009)

Publications

• Meyer, E.T., Carpenter, K. and Middleton, M. (2009) World Wide Web of Humanities. Final Project Report to JISC.

Webcasts

• The World Wide Web of Humanities: Project Workshop

  Recorded on: 19 March 2009 Duration: 00:00:00

  Results of a project that aims to establish a framework for e-Humanities research using open source tools and technologies and archived web content to create novel research interfaces to the first of many, scholarly, e-Humanities web collections.

• Toolkits for e-Humanities: Project Workshop

  Recorded on: 19 March 2009 Duration: 00:00:00

  Presenting the results of the Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study project, which combines quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources.

Last updated on: 2 February 2010