Research with the Archive Unleashed

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Library as Laboratory Recap: Applications of Web Archive Cohort Program

From projects that compare public health misinformation to feminist media tactics, the Internet Archive is providing researchers with vital data to assist them with archival web collection analysis.

In the second of a series of webinars highlighting how the Internet Archive supports digital humanities research, five scholars shared their experience with the Archives Unleashed Project on March 16.


Archives Unleashed was established in 2017 with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The team developed open-source, user-friendly Archives Research Compute Hub (ARCH) tools to allow researchers to phone number library conduct scalable analyses, as well as resources and tutorials. An effort to build and engage a community of users led to a partnership with the Internet Archive.

A cohort program was launched in 2020 to provide researchers with mentoring and technical expertise to conduct analyses of archival web material on a variety of topics. The webinar speakers provided an overview of their innovative projects:


WATCH: Crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic was the focus of an investigation by Tim Ribaric and researchers at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Using fully extracted texts from websites of municipal governments, community organizations and others, the team compared how well information was conveyed to the public. The analysis assessed four facets of communication: resilience, education, trust and engagement. The data set was used to teach senior communication students at the university about digital scholarship, Ribaric said, and the team is now finalizing a manuscript with the results of the analysis.