Web Archives Research: Return of the Cohorts
The Archives Unleashed Project launched the Cohort Program to support research engagement with web archives, foster a multi-level mentorship model, and demonstrate the diverse applications of web archives for scholarly inquiry.
Over the course of this program, we have collectively hosted and collaborated with forty-five researchers from 21 unique institutions across the globe.
Following a successful and energy-packed year, we are pleased to introduce the five teams participating in the cohort program’s second round. These research teams will investigate a diverse range of topics by exploring web archive collections curated by Archive-It partners.
Latin American Women’s Rights Movements: Tracing Online Presence through Language, Time and Space
- Sylvia Fernandez, University of Texas at San Antonio
- Rosario Rogel-Salazar, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca
- Verónica Benítez-Pérez, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca
- Alan Colín-Arce, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca
- Abraham García-Monroy, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca
The lack of effective responses to femicides and gender-based violence towards indigenous women and women of colour is not only legible across Mexico but comparatively in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, and other parts of the globe.
Throughout the years, women have formed collectives and organizations in public and digital spaces to fight against impunity and to demand justice and rights. This has led to the creation of many online sites, social media profiles, and digital activism.
By engaging web archive collections curated around human rights and feminist movements, project collaborators will examine how these sites have shifted over time and explore language expressions used by women’s rights movements in Mexico and Latin America.
Ultimately, web archives will provide a critical perspective to understanding how the movements against femicides and gender-based violence created a digital identity publicly and in the online domain.
Historicizing Aughts-Era Mormon Mommy Blogging Media Landscapes
- Emily Edwards, St. Francis College
- Robin Hershkowitz, Bowling Green State University
In the era of post-blogging, or microblogging, this project will explore early aughts Mormon mommy blogging culture, mediations of marriage, mothering, and feminine domesticity to historicize this period in relation to contemporary manifestations and trends of mommy influencing on social media platforms.
Feminist scholars have emphasized that practices of mommy blogging and social media influencing are forms of affective digital labour (Mäkinen 2020). This project also emphasizes that these mediated practices of Mormon mommy blogging in the early aughts not only are forms of socially reproductive labour but are ideologically productive as well (Jarrett 2015). Project collaborators will identify connections and transitions to new media ecologies and new iterations of racialized, gendered domestic ideologies that share historic genealogies to digital media practices and structures pioneered by Mormon mommy bloggers.
Web Archiving and the Saskatchewan COVID Archive: Expanding Coverage to Capture Social Media, Medical Misinformation, and Radicalization
- Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan
- Derek Cameron, University of Saskatchewan
- Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan
- Craig Harkema, University of Saskatchewan
- Patrick Chasse, University of Saskatchewan
- Tim Hutchinson, University of Saskatchewan
The Saskatchewan COVID Archive project began in April 2020 to ensure the capture and preservation of sites that reflected the conversations around and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saskatchewan. Using this rich dataset, the project will examine how the pandemic response unexpectedly fostered social movements that challenged mainstream ideas about science, public health, and individual responsibility.
Using web archives collected by the University of Saskatchewan, this project seeks to map and connect conversations and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic with the province of Saskatchewan. The research team will develop timelines and knowledge trees to provide an opportunity to learn about the causal relationship between social media and this important shift in public health policy in Saskatchewan.
Querying Queer Web Archives
- Filipa Calado, The Graduate Center, CUNY
- Corey Clawson, Rutgers University — Newark
- Di Yoong, The Graduate Center, CUNY
- Lisa Rhody, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Studying web archives from a variety of angles that pertain to contemporary subfields and areas of interest in Queer Studies, this team will investigate how queerness interacts with, is informed by, and forms web spaces. In particular, the project will focus on how queerness has been theorized across various web communities and what web materials and formats can teach us about the creation of queer community. In studying queer online spaces, project investigators will explore investments in concepts like utopia, play, radicalism, normativity, religion, and conversion and how they affect queer identity and discourse formation over time.
Using Web Archives for Mapping the Use of Cultural Practices in Postconflict Societies and During Reconciliation Processes
- Ricardo Velasco Trujillo, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Luis Gomez, The Australian Academy of Science
Despite the growing interest in the role of cultural practices during reconciliation processes, in societies trying to confront the legacies of troubled pasts and widespread human rights violations, there is a broad gap in statistical knowledge and a lack of reliable data regarding what type of cultural practices are used, and their correlation in the effectiveness of reconciliation processes across different geographical and cultural contexts.
Employing computational methods such as contextual search, data mining, and web scraping, amongst others, this project aims at making an initial assessment and mapping out the use of cultural practices in different reconciliation processes and across several human rights organizations working actively in post-conflict societies.
Stay up to date with Cohorts by visiting the program page: https://archivesunleashed.org/cohorts2022-2023/
