Emily Maemura Presentation

Emily Maemura will give the talk, "Situating Data Curation through an Ethnography of Web Archives Infrastructure."

Abstract: Web archives collections capture online cultural heritage and are increasingly of interest for historical scholarship, media studies, as well as a range of researchers and the general public. In order to use these collections, researchers face technical challenges in curating, selecting and analyzing large-scale datasets, as well as navigating legal limitations and varying access policies. This talk explores two settings where research infrastructures are being developed to support this work: the National Cultural Heritage Cluster that supports use of the Danish Royal Library's Netarchive, and the Archives Unleashed Toolkit that supports use of Archive-It collections from Canadian academic libraries. Informed by an infrastructure studies approach, the analysis of these cases highlights how digital curation is always inherently categorical work, requiring interpretation and negotiation of the categories inherent in digital materials, the design of systems, and organizational policies. Findings locate where data categories are compatible or incompatible when translated between systems, reinforcing how an archival framing of data's sociotechnical context is necessary for emerging approaches of critical data studies, and crucial to understanding algorithmic systems.

Emily Maemura is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Her research focuses on web archives collections, humanities research infrastructures, and the sociotechnical processes and decisions applied in data curation practices. Her work has involved collaborations with the Digital Curation Institute at the Faculty of Information and Aarhus University's NetLab, and has been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

Meeting ID: 895 7528 9365
Password: 199836

Questions? Contact Lori Kelso