Week 9 - Meetings and Web Futures

Let's take some to chat individually about your project this week.

Prep for Tuesday

• No assigned readings, but you should be doing more research for your proposal!

Tuesday, March 19

• No class meeting, instead sign up for an individual meeting on this Boxnote. If you can't find a time that works. If you have to change your time, email me!

Prep for Thursday

• Read all of Can the Internet be Archived?
• Read most of Chapter 3 in History in the Age of Abundance?. Try to get through the first 13 pages.
• Finalize project proposal due on Thursday!

Thursday, March 21

• icebreaker: what always cheers you up?
• Heads-up: Prof. Elizabeth Teaff will be observing class today!
• reading discussion
  • On your own, what is one big takeaway from the readings + one big question you have.
  • Discuss at your table, then we'll have a whole group discussion.
• Activity 9.1: Web Archives Projects
  • At your table, spend some time with one of the following projects:
    • Saving Ukrainian Heritage Online (SUCHO)
    • DocNow
    • Library of Congress Web Archives
    • Rhizome ArtBase
  • Answer these questions:
    • Who made this project?
    • What are their stated goals?
    • What is the scope of the collection? (time period, topic, amount, type)
    • What can you do with this collection?
• Activity 9.2: Your turn!
  • What needs to be saved from your generation? If a historian is going to write about the 2020s, what websites and other digital media need to be saved? Archivists call this appraisal.
  • Let's use Poll Everywhere to generate and vote on ideas, then organize ourselves around the most popular topics.
  • When you have your topic, work with your team to identify 5-10 of the most important websites or other digital media that need to be saved for historians. Why are these the best representative sites?
  • Use the Internet Archive to start capturing these websites. What is easy/challenging about this process? What do you anticipate will be a problem? What ethical factors do you need to consider?

Week 9 Assignments

Due Tuesday at 12pm

Blog post #9

Revision is important! In this post, you'll briefly summarize my feedback on Canvas and in our discussion at our individual meeting, then describe what you did with that feedback. How did your thinking change? What did you modify about your project? What further steps do you need to take? What are your very specific next steps?

Specs:

• Create a WordPress post, turn in the link on Canvas.
• 150-300 words.
• Free from grammatical errors, typos.
• Credit and link out to sources when appropriate. I won't require that you use a certain citation style, but you should be in the habit of crediting sources and using in-text links. If you feel better about using a formal citation style, go for it!

Activity log #9

Let's build on the work we did in class to identify and collect current websites for posterity and future research. In class you decided on important topics as a collective. For this activity log, I want you to pick out 3-5 sites on a single topic that matters to you personally. You don't have to worry about whether they're of historical significance - these are sites that you want to be part of the cultural record.

Specs:

• Create a WordPress post, turn in the link on Canvas.
• 200-300 words.
• Free from grammatical errors, typos.
• Credit and link out to sources when appropriate. I won't require that you use a certain citation style, but you should be in the habit of crediting sources and using in-text links. If you feel better about using a formal citation style, go for it!
• Identify 3-5 websites and save the links in the Internet Archive.
• List the captured link and write a few sentences on 1) why this site matters (to you) and 2) any challenges to capturing this site. Are there ethical issues? Technical ones? For instance, is it password protected? Subject to an algorithm? Is the content too dynamic to capture easily? Does the site consent to being saved?