Some years ago (in 2010, I think) I gave an interview about the experience of doing a Ph.D., as part of an Institute of Historical Research project on the past and future of the history doctorate. For completeness, I make it available here.
Amongst other things, it reflects how different my Ph.D. would have been had resources such as Early English Books Online been available in 1998. The interviewer is the redoubtable Danny Millum (@ReviewsHistory)
Institute of Historical Research
Web archives: a new class of primary source for historians ?
On June 11th I gave a short paper at the Digital History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, looking at the implications of web archives for historical practice, and introducing some of the work I’ve been doing (at the British Library) with the JISC-funded Analytical Access to the Domain Dark Archive project. It picked up on themes in a previous post here.
There is also an audio version here at HistorySpot along with the second paper in the session, given by Richard Deswarte.
The abstract (for the two papers together) reads:
“When viewed in historical context, the speed at which the world wide web has become fundamental to the exchange of information is perhaps unprecedented. The Internet Archive began its work in archiving the web in 1996, and since then national libraries and other memory institutions have followed suit in archiving the web along national or thematic lines. However, whilst scholars of the web as a system have been quick to embrace archived web materials as the stuff of their scholarship, historians have been slower in thinking through the nature and possible uses of a new class of primary source.
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