Introduction to Web Archiving (DHSI 2026)

Description

This introductory course seeks to provide participants with an understanding of how to access, create, and use web archives for research and preservation purposes. Web archiving is the process of collecting web resources in an archival format and making them available for access. These archives are increasingly used to preserve ephemeral information online, and to research past uses of the web and how they reflect or influence broader social and cultural processes.

The course will provide an overview of what web archiving is and why it is important, describe the current tools for accessing and creating web archives, explore how they can be used for research, and discuss the political and ethical issues that arise when archiving the web. The course also has a practical component for participants to create a collection of archived websites of their interest and to draft an archival policy for the websites they will collect. This course can be of interest to students, researchers, and librarians interested in researching online spaces and preserving ephemeral information shared on the web.

Instructor(s)

Alan Colin-Arce is a researcher at the University of Victoria’s Electronic Textual Culture Lab. His research focuses on the influence of language and geography in knowledge production, especially in web archives and scholarly communication. He has contributed to several multilingual digital humanities projects, including the Humanities and Social Sciences Commons, Huellas Incómodas/Uncomfortable Footprints, and Latin American Women’s Rights Movements: Tracing Online Presence through Language, Time and Space.