PI: Dr. Matthew Weber, Co-PIs: Dr. David Lazer (Northeastern University), Kris Carpenter (Internet Archive)
The BCC-SBE Collaborative Research Project, “Using Archival Resources to Conduct Data-Intensive Internet Research,” has three goals: (1) to build a community of scholars focused on tackling next-generation questions of Internet research through the use of archival digital data; (2) to create sample databases and develop a prototype research tool, HistoryTracker, using data from the Internet Archive, a library of Web pages from the World Wide Web; and (3) to maintain an active community of scholars using the cutting-edge community platform HUBzero. Co-PIs Weber, Lazer and Carpenter will lead a community building initiative to coalesce scholars around these three goals. In the long-run, this work will support ongoing interactions among community participants, including the collection of feedback, sharing research, and dissemination of databases collected through the course of this research and beyond. Convenient, efficient access to archival Internet data has the potential to open up countless new avenues of social science research In addition, evidence from this research project will inform the creation and dissemination of general guidelines for conducting theoretically and methodologically rigorous longitudinal research using archival Web data.