A project led by Assistant Professor Emily Maemura has been chosen as one of four initiatives selected for funding through a partnership between the University of Illinois System and the University of Toronto.
Maemura will serve as principal investigator at Illinois for the project, "Envisioning Critical Futures for Archives as Data," with Jessica Lapp, assistant professor in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information, who is serving as principal investigator in Toronto. Project collaborators also include Associate Professor Karen Wickett, and Librarian Jess Whyte from University of Toronto Libraries.
Their project explores how sociocultural data from historical records are collected, manipulated, stored, visualized, extracted, and interpreted, with a focus on the fair and ethical consideration of creators and people represented in these records. The team will run two workshops—the first in Toronto in Fall 2025 and the second in Champaign in Spring 2026—that will engage researchers and practitioners interested in critical archival studies, data science, library and archives special collections, digital curation and preservation, and digital humanities.
"Our goal is to develop a set of shared concerns and commitments for addressing the challenges of engaging with data and computational methods while embracing the needs of localized, community-centered archives," said Maemura.
Launched in 2024, the new partnership seeks to accelerate economic development through the advancement of innovative technologies. Funding comes from the University of Toronto's Office of the Vice President, International and the University of Illinois System's President's Office and Office of the Vice President for Economic Development and Innovation.
Maemura's research focuses on data practices and the activities of curation, description, characterization, and reuse of archived web data. She is interested in approaches and methods for working with archived web data in the form of large-scale research collections, considering diverse perspectives of the internet as an object and site of study. She earned her PhD at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information.