My new book, History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research has arrived and is shipping! You can purchase the affordable paperback ($29 Canadian dollars) at booksellers including Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Indigo, or beyond.

What’s the book about? Here’s the blurb from the publisher.

Believe it or not, the 1990s are history. As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive have been collecting for the past three decades. 

In History in the Age of Abundance? Ian Milligan argues that web-based historical sources and their archives present extraordinary opportunities as well as daunting technical and ethical challenges for historians. Through case studies, he outlines the approaches, methods, tools, and search functions that can help a historian turn web documents into historical sources. He also considers the implications of the size and scale of digital sources, which amount to more information than historians have ever had at their fingertips, and many of which are by and about people who have traditionally been absent from the historical record. Scrutinizing the concept of the web and the mechanics of its archives, Milligan explains how these new media challenge, reshape, and enrich both the historical profession and the historical record.

A wake-up call for historians of the twenty-first century, History in the Age of Abundance? is an essential introduction to the way web archives work, what possibilities they open up, what risks they entail, and what the shift to digital information means for historians, their professional training and organization, and society as a whole.

Some esteemed colleagues have also provided advance reviews of History in the Age of Abundance? for which I’m eternally grateful.

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Happy to announce that Chad Gaffield (University of Ottawa) and myself are organizing a workshop to be held between February 27th and March 1st 2019 at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences.

Keep reading to see what the workshop is all about, or click on the poster to see more.

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My fourth book (second sole-authored), History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Resarch, is appearing in April 2019 with McGill-Queen’s University Press. It’s currently available for pre-order from McGill-Queen’s, Amazon, or resellers in other countries. You will also hopefully be able to find it in a library near you (if not, you can always ask ’em to buy it).

Long Description:

Believe it or not, the 1990s are history. As historians turn to study this period and beyond, they will encounter a historical record that is radically different from what has ever existed before. Old websites, social media, blogs, photographs, and videos are all part of the massive quantities of digital information that technologists, librarians, archivists, and organizations such as the Internet Archive have been collecting for the past three decades. 

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It would be “fantastic news,” wrote the New Leftist leader in 1962, if the nuclear-tipped Bomarc missiles – potentially housed in Canada– could be re-directed by the Soviet Union after launch to destroy their own bases. I read these documents in the McMaster University archives while writing an MA course paper in 2006 (which would later grow into my first book).

This nuclear-missile letter helped me to understand the context of the New Left, as well as the cultural divide that was manifesting itself between New Leftists and mainstream Canadian progressive politics.

What if that missile quip had been a tweet? A college student tweeting something like that today could quickly become the focus of an outrage campaign. But how could a historian make sense of something like that in the future?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this during the latest “dig-up-old-tweets-to-take-them-out-of-context” scandal, where The Verge’s (soon to be part of the New York Times editorial board) Sarah Jeong saw tweets from 2013 and 2014 used as part of an alt-right campaign to discredit her. I’m probably not the only person to have thought about the hidden treasures sitting in my own Twitter timeline, and wondered about how they might be misinterpreted by others – say, a historian in the future, using social media as a historical source. (more…)

I’m part of a team that’s just published a new article, “If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance” in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. If your institution subscribes, you can find the article here. Alternatively, we have a preprint here.

Our abstract does a hopefully good job of explaining what the article is about. Read on if you’re curious: (more…)

We heard some exciting news yesterday! I’m part of an interdisciplinary team, led by Virginia Tech Libraries and Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science, and in collaboration with Los Alamos, Old Dominion University, Internet Archive, and George Washington University Libraries, that will be exploring “Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving.” This was funded as part of the Institute of Museum and Library Services‘ Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.

The overall grant is valued at $248,451.00 USD, and here at the University of Waterloo we’ll be using $20,000 USD to support our efforts on the grant. In particular, this will help support a PhD Candidate and also some knowledge mobilization activities.

I can’t wait to see our grant vision be realized and to help assemble “a collection of educational resources, cyberinfrastructure for deploying tools to support the curriculum (including source code), and other related resources.”

I had the great pleasure to be a speaker at the Ethics and Archiving the Web conference at the New Museum in New York City. My own contribution to the conference was a piece on the “Ethics of Studying GeoCities.”

The livestream of the whole conference is available here.

Hi everybody and thanks so much for coming to my talk today. What I want to do is discuss the “ethics of studying GeoCities,” which to me gets at both the potential but also the risks of doing a lot of this web archival research. (more…)