Monday, September 16, 2019

CFP: Archives Unleashed Datathon @ Columbia University (March 26-27, 2020)

Invitation to participate in the Archives Unleashed #HackArchives event at Columbia University, New York City.
For those who are interested in web archiving, the Archives Unleashed Project (https://archivesunleashed.org) will be hosting its fourth datathon event. This event offers an opportunity for participants to work with the Toolkit and web archives at scale. These events have been attended by librarians, archivists, and researchers from a number of fields including history, computer science, digital humanities, journalism studies and beyond.
Please help us share this news by forwarding to any interested parties!
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Archives Unleashed: Call for Participation
Web Data at Scale with the Archives Unleashed Toolkit
Butler Library | Columbia University, New York City
26-27 March 2020

Web Archives
The World Wide Web has had a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form, presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this information is captured within web archives.
Web archives often contain hundreds of billions of web pages, ranging from individual homepages and social media posts, to institutional websites. These archives offer tremendous potential for social scientists and humanists, and the questions research may pose stretches across a multitude of fields. In short, web archives offer the ability to reconstruct large-scale traces of the relatively recent past.
Archives Unleashed Toolkit
The Archives Unleashed Team has partnered with Columbia University Libraries to host our fourth Archives Unleashed datathon.
This event is tailored towards web archives practitioners and researchers. The Archives Unleashed datathon presents an opportunity for librarians, archivists, researchers, computer scientists, and others to collaboratively work with web collections and explore cutting-edge research tools through hands on experience.
This event will bring together a small group of approximately 15-20 participants to experiment with the newest release of the Archives Unleashed Toolkit and the Archives Unleashed Cloud, and to kick-off collaboratively inspired research projects. Participants will have access to analytics software and specialists, and will be exposed to the process of working with web archive files at scale. For more information on AUT and the Cloud, please visit http://archivesunleashed.org/.
Sponsors + Travel Grants
This event is possible thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University Libraries, University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts, York University Libraries, and Compute Canada.
The Archives Unleashed team is pleased to offer modest travel grants to help attendees participate in this event. These grants can cover up to $1,000 USD in travel expenses. If you require financial assistance to attend the event, please indicate in your statement of interest that you would like to be considered for the travel grant.
Submission Guidelines
Those interested in participating should send a 250-word expression of interest and a short one-page CV to the Archives Unleashed Team (sam.fritz@archivesunleashed.org) by midnight (EST) on 1 November 2019. This expression of interest should address your background and interests in web archiving, and what you would hope to get out of working with tools and web archive data at scale. Applicants will be notified by 12 November 2019.
On behalf of the organizers,
Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo)
Pamela Graham (Columbia University)
Samantha Abrams (Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation)
Alexander Thurman (Columbia University)
Nick Ruest (York University) 
Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo)
Samantha Fritz (University of Waterloo)
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