Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities

I participated as an Academic Adviser in the UK based research project ’Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities’. My focus was on the theoretical and methodological issues related to the scholarly use of web archives.
The project was headed by Professor Jane Winters, the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the participating institutions were the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, the Oxford Internet Institute, British Library, NetLab/the Centre for Internet Studies.
The BUDDAH project works with the dataset derived from the UK domain web crawl from 1996 to 2013 (that is, when legal deposit legislation was extended to cover digital materials), totalling approximately 65 terabytes and constituting many billions of words. A key objective of the project will be to develop a theoretical and methodological framework within which to study this data, which will be applicable to the much larger on-going UK domain crawl, as well as in other national contexts. Researchers will work with developers at the British Library to co-produce tools which will support their requirements, testing different methods and approaches.
A major study of the history of UK web space from 1996 to 2013, including language, file formats, the development of multimedia content, shifts in power and access, and so on, will be complemented by a series of sub-projects from a range of disciplines, for example contemporary history, literature, gender studies and material culture.