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Observing web archives: The case for an ethnographic study of web archiving

Observing web archives: The case for an ethnographic study of web archiving
Observing web archives: The case for an ethnographic study of web archiving
This paper makes the case for studying the work of web archivists, in an effort to explore the ways in which practitioners shape the preservation and maintenance of the archived Web in its various forms. An ethnographic approach is taken through the use of observation, interviews and documentary sources over the course of several weeks in collaboration with web archivists, engineers and managers at the Internet Archive - a private, non-profit digital library that has been archiving the Web since 1996. The concept of web archival labour is proposed to encompass and highlight the ways in which web archivists (as both networked human and non-human agents) shape and maintain the preserved Web through work that is often embedded in and obscured by the complex technical arrangements of collection and access. As a result, this engagement positions web archives as places of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, revealing new insights into the performative nature of web archiving that have implications for how these data are used and understood.
web archiving, knowledge production, STS, materiality, information labour
Association for Computing Machinery
Ogden, Jessica
b6d5ec4e-8ea5-421c-8db2-d46aea6af925
Halford, Susan
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Carr, Leslie
0572b10e-039d-46c6-bf05-57cce71d3936
Ogden, Jessica
b6d5ec4e-8ea5-421c-8db2-d46aea6af925
Halford, Susan
0d0fe4d6-3c4b-4887-84bb-738cf3249d46
Carr, Leslie
0572b10e-039d-46c6-bf05-57cce71d3936

Ogden, Jessica, Halford, Susan and Carr, Leslie (2017) Observing web archives: The case for an ethnographic study of web archiving. In Proceedings of WebSci’17, Troy, NY, USA., June 25–28, 2017. Association for Computing Machinery. 10 pp . (In Press) (doi:10.1145/3091478.3091506).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This paper makes the case for studying the work of web archivists, in an effort to explore the ways in which practitioners shape the preservation and maintenance of the archived Web in its various forms. An ethnographic approach is taken through the use of observation, interviews and documentary sources over the course of several weeks in collaboration with web archivists, engineers and managers at the Internet Archive - a private, non-profit digital library that has been archiving the Web since 1996. The concept of web archival labour is proposed to encompass and highlight the ways in which web archivists (as both networked human and non-human agents) shape and maintain the preserved Web through work that is often embedded in and obscured by the complex technical arrangements of collection and access. As a result, this engagement positions web archives as places of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, revealing new insights into the performative nature of web archiving that have implications for how these data are used and understood.

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Accepted/In Press date: 22 May 2017
Additional Information: This paper is based on data collected and fieldwork undertaken by the first author as part of their PhD research.
Venue - Dates: ACM Web Science 2017, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, United States, 2017-06-25 - 2017-06-28
Keywords: web archiving, knowledge production, STS, materiality, information labour
Organisations: Web & Internet Science, Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, Social Sciences

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 410123
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/410123
PURE UUID: 2ca0b81a-9559-4e4d-8106-02799be09426
ORCID for Jessica Ogden: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4696-7340
ORCID for Leslie Carr: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

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Date deposited: 03 Jun 2017 04:03
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 02:33

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Contributors

Author: Jessica Ogden ORCID iD
Author: Susan Halford
Author: Leslie Carr ORCID iD

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