Professor William H. Dutton
Senior Fellow, Advisory Board Member
Bill Dutton was the OII’s Founding Director, a Fellow of Balliol College and the first Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University.
World Wide Web of Humanities
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 aimed 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’ was 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.
Senior Fellow, Advisory Board Member
Bill Dutton was the OII’s Founding Director, a Fellow of Balliol College and the first Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University.
Senior Research Fellow
Ralph Schroeder has interests in shared virtual environments and the sociology of science and technology. His current research is related to digital media and populism, climate change online, AI and social theory, and the internet in China and India.
Former Visiting Fellow
Robert Ackland is a Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). He has interests in the development of new methods (and associated e-Research tools) for quantitative analysis of social and economic phenomena on the Internet.
Senior Fellow
Eric T. Meyer is a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute. His research looks at the changing nature of knowledge creation in science, medicine, social science, arts, and humanities as technology is embedded in everyday practices.
Former DPhil Student
Christine Madsen is a librarian and academic whose research aims to re-centre libraries at the heart of all the disciplines, and re-focus the work of librarians on creating a space for the transformation of information into knowledge.