The Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive (AADDA) project has brought together a group of scholars to help us formulate which analytical tools users will need to make the most of the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset, a dataset of all the holdings of the Internet Archive for the UK from 1996 to 2010.

A (very large) geo-index of the data is already available for download, and the dataset can also be visualised using the Ngram. But this group of scholars of the humanities and social sciences are beginning to imagine the projects they would like to pursue using the data. I myself began to sketch an answer in a previous post on the AADDA blog.

Since then, summaries of those projects have been appearing on the project blog. Here are some of them.

(i) Dr Richard Deswarte will be Exploring and uncovering Euroscepticism in the Dark Archive.

(ii) Saskia Huc-Hepher (University of Westminster) will be exploring the spatial dimensions of the French community in London.

(iii) Professor Gemma Moss (Institute of Education) will be examining the use of statistical data in setting agendas for education change, and the PISA rankings in particular.

(iii) Carole Taylor is investigating the decline of parliamentary political engagement and its implications.

(iv) Helen Taylor (Royal Holloway, University of London) will be examining the reception of the Liverpool poets

Watch out for more posts here on this project as it unfolds. It is a collaboration between ourselves at the British Library, the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) and the University of Cambridge, and is funded by the JISC.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.