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Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit

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Milligan_ian.pdf (1.89 MB)

Date

2013-05-01

Authors

Milligan, Ian

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada

Abstract

“Mining the Internet Graveyard” argues that the advent of massive quantity of born-digital historical sources necessitates a rethinking of the historians’ toolkit. The contours of a third wave of computational history are outlined, a trend marked by ever-increasing amounts of digitized information (especially web based), falling digital storage costs, a move to the cloud, and a corresponding increase in computational power to process these sources. Following this, the article uses a case study of an early born-digital archive at Library and Archives Canada – Canada’s Digital Collections project (CDC) – to bring some of these problems into view. An array of off-the-shelf data analysis solutions, coupled with code written in Mathematica, helps us bring context and retrieve information from a digital collection on a previously inaccessible scale. The article concludes with an illustration of the various computational tools available, as well as a call for greater digital literacy in history curricula and professional development.

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Keywords

digital history, web archives, information retrieval

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Citation

URI

http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1015788ar
 http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10037

Collections

Waterloo Research
History