Saving the Web: Reflections on web archiving as future-making practice
Dr Jessica Ogden (Lecturer in Digital Futures, Bristol Digital Futures Institute and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol)
BDFI, 65 Avon Street, Bristol, BS2 0PZ
Hosted by the Bristol Digital Futures Institute
Web archives provide essential windows into the Web experience through time. From early social networking sites like Myspace to web collections on 9/11, these digital archives memorialise the Web in ways that fundamentally shape our understanding of the past.
This talk will bring together findings from research into ‘the social life of web archives’, to highlight the significance and critical role that web archives are playing in the circulation and commodification of web data, as well as computational innovation, more broadly.
The talk will chart a history of web archiving, identifying its roots in cybernetics, early AI and large-scale computing initiatives and pre-Web search and retrieval systems. Hear about the ways that data have been moving beyond the confines of web archives and into everyday life online, shaping current discourses related to trust and mis/disinformation online, privacy and the right to be forgotten.
Bio: Dr Jessica Ogden is a Lecturer in Digital Futures at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Jessica received a PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on web futures and the politics of data/archives, web archiving and digital data scholarship. She was Principal Investigator on the ESRC grant-funded project The Social Life of Web Archives looking at the broader impact of web archives online and has published widely on the topic. She is also Lead for the Digital Societies Faculty Research Group.