TORONTO, June 29, 2017 − The University of Waterloo and York University have been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past.
Accessing and analyzing large web archives are currently prohibitive challenges for most researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Ian Milligan and his co - Principal Investigators, Nick Ruest and Jimmy Lin, Professor and David R. Cheriton Chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, aim to change this.
The grant, valued at $610,625, supports Archives Unleashed, a project that will develop web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars and librarians to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web. It is additionally supported by generous in-kind and financial contributions from Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, York University Libraries and the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Arts.