Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK) is a Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portal project. Bringing together 20 core years and 35 TB of storage over the next three years (valued at $11,635), we will use these resources to bring Canadian Archive-It partners together with our analytic tools. Right now, there are great Canadian web archives, but they're siloed. WALK will hopefully begin to end that. The team consists of Ian Milligan and Nick Ruest as co-PIs, as well as a great team of librarians and researchers at the University of Alberta (including Geoff Harder, Todd Suomela, Sonya Betz, Peter Binkley, and Geoffrey Rockwell), the Internet Archive (Jefferson Bailey), and Compute Canada (John Simpson).
Capitalizing on research relationships cultivated between Canadian research libraries and the Internet Archive, this project will provide researcher access to currently under-utilized web collections as well as to train highly-qualified personnel in the humanities to prepare for the digital deluge that is already affecting our profession. The project will be among the first attempts to harness data in ways that will enable present and future humanities and social science scholars to usefully access, interpret, and curate the masses of born-digital primary sources that document our recent past.
Any questions, please e-mail Ian Milligan or Nick Ruest.