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Ian Milligan

Associate Professor of History

University of Waterloo

About me

Ian Milligan’s primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practice more generally. He is author of two monographs: History in the Age of Abundance (2019) and Rebel Youth (2014). Milligan also co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data (2015, with Shawn Graham and Scott Weingart) and edited the SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018, with Niels Brügger).

Milligan is principal investigator of the Archives Unleashed project. In 2016, he was awarded the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award and in 2019 he received the Arts Excellence in Research award from the University of Waterloo. Milligan held an Ontario Early Researcher Award between 2015 and 2020.

He lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with his partner, son, and daughter.

You can read his full CV here.

Interests

  • Web archives and web history
  • Digital history and digital humanities
  • How technology is changing the historical profession

Education

  • PhD in History, 2012

    York University

  • MA in History, 2007

    York University

  • BA (Hon) in History, 2006

    Queen's University

Recent Posts

Archived blog posts pre-dating November 10th, 2019 can be found at http://ianmilli.wordpress.com.

TVO's The Agenda: The Undoing of History

I had the great pleasure of appearing on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a fantastic current-affairs show that, to my mind, …

Review of History in the Age of Abundance in Internet Histories

Max Kemman, a recent PhD and now researcher/consultant (with a great and active blog), has just published a review of History in the …

Re-Posted from the Conversation: Don’t despair if your teen wants to major in history instead of science

Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo It might be your worst nightmare. Your child, sitting at the kitchen table, slides you a brochure …

A Blast from the Past: My SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Application

The most popular thing I probably ever wrote on my old site was my SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship statement of interest. So here it is …

Hello World: Welcome to my new Site

After ten years of blogging (seriously) at the WordPress.com version of ianmilligan.ca, the time has come for a new look and platform …

Books

History in the Age of Abundance: How the Web is Transforming Historical Research

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.

SAGE Handbook of Web History

The SAGE Handbook of Web History marks the first comprehensive review of this subject to date. Its editors emphasise the two different forms of its study: the use of the web as an historical resource, and the web as an object of study in its own right. Bringing together all the existing knowledge of the field, with an interdisciplinary focus and an international scope, this is an incomparable resource for historians and students alike.

Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope

The Digital Humanities have flourished at a moment when digital big data is becoming easily available. Yet there is a gap in the scholarly literature on the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for both research and in our teaching and learning. We are on the cusp of needing to grasp big data approaches to do our work, whether it’s understanding the underlying algorithms at work in our search engines, or needing to design and use our own tools to process comparatively large amounts of information. This book fills that gap, and in its live-writing approach, will set the direction for the conversation into the future.

Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada

While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were pressing for wildcat strikes and defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy that swept the country. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of a single youth phenomenon. With no fewer than seventy interviews complementing the extensive use of archival records, this book reveals a youth current that, despite regional differences, spanned an intellectual network from Halifax to Victoria that read the same publications, consulted the same thinkers, and found inspiration in the same shared ideas.

Current Digital Projects

Archives Unleashed

Archives Unleashed aims to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are developing web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars, librarians and archivists to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web. Please visit our website for more information. Principal Investigator (w/ Nick Ruest and Jimmy Lin)

Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving (CEDWARC)

Supported by the IMLS LB21 program, the CEDWARC project develops a continuing education curriculum and teaches library and archive professionals advanced web archiving and analysis techniques. We will offer one in-person training workshop and multiple online training workshops throughout the project period. Details about the project. Co-Investigator (grant led by Zhiwu Xie at Virginia Tech)

A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996-2014

This project will help train highly-qualified personnel (HQP) in the humanities to prepare for the digital deluge that is already affecting our profession. It was among the first attempts to harness data in ways that will enable present and future historians to usefully access, interpret, and curate masses of born-digital primary sources. Principal Investigator (w/ Nick Ruest and William J. Turkel)

Recent Courses

Note: I have been teaching at a reduced rate over the last three years, due to two parental leaves (July-October 2017 and August-December 2019) and course reductions due to the Archives Unleashed project.

HIST 216: A Long History of the Internet

New Online Course! The Internet has enabled global connection on an unprecedented level. To live and innovate in a society dominated by network communications requires understanding from where we have come. Yet, as Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have noted, “the Internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t totally understand.” (Schmidt and Cohen)

While the technological story of the rise of the Internet and the Web today is important – our course touches on early computing, theories of hypertext, the ARPANET, and the networking revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s – the longer human story is equally critical. How has the concept of information evolved? How has print media emerged and evolved? How have humans communicated over time and space? How have common standards evolved, allowing people across the globe to communicate with each other?

Previously taught Fall 2018 and Winter 2018.
See course page

ARTS 490: Socio-Cultural Implications of Artificial Intelligence

We have seen exponential growth in the automation of jobs, from the manufacturing to the service sector, and the consequent transformations of our everyday lives, including the displacement of human labour. We are also witness to new cultural forms ranging from gaming devices to companion robots. It’s clear then that the socio-cultural and political impacts of such trends deserve our attention – as students, scholars, policy makers, and practitioners.
See course page

Recent & Upcoming Talks/Events

For a full list of talks and presentations, please see my CV.

Archives Unleashed Datathon - Montreal (IIPC)

This event will bring together a small group of participants to experiment with the newest release of the Archives Unleashed Toolkit …

Archives Unleashed Datathon - New York City

The World Wide Web has had a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that …

Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud Advisory Board Meeting

I’m honoured to be on the advisory board for this remarkable project. Our first meeting is in February.

Becoming a Desk(top) Profession: Digital Photography and the Changing Landscape of Archival Research

Visiting a reading room in the last five years is a very different experience than what they looked like even fifteen years ago. While …

Contact

You can send me an e-mail at i2milligan@uwaterloo.ca or use the form below.