We are delighted to have been awarded Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for a new research project, ‘Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities’. The project, one of 21 to be funded as part of the AHRC’s Big Data Projects call, is led by the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), in collaboration with ourselves at the British Library, the Oxford Internet Institute and Aarhus University.

Here are some details, from the project blog:

"The project aims to transform the way in which researchers in the arts and humanities engage with the archived web, focusing on data derived from the UK web domain crawl for the period 1996-2013. Web archives are an increasingly important resource for arts and humanities researchers, yet we have neither the expertise nor the tools to use them effectively. Both the data itself, totalling approximately 65 terabytes and constituting many billions of words, and the process of collection are poorly understood, and it is possible only to draw the broadest of conclusions from current analysis.

"A key objective of the project will be to develop a theoretical and methodological framework within which to study this data, which will be applicable to the much larger on-going UK domain crawl, as well as in other national contexts. Researchers will work with developers at the British Library to co-produce tools which will support their requirements, testing different methods and approaches. In addition, a major study of the history of UK web space from 1996 to 2013 will be complemented by a series of small research projects from a range of disciplines, for example contemporary history, literature, gender studies and material culture.