Saving the Web: Reflections on web archiving as future-making practice

Bristol Digital Futures Institute

Join BDFI academic Dr Jessica Ogden at this seminar looking into the history of web archives and their role in 'future-making'.

Web archives provide essential windows into the Web experience through time. From early social networking sites like Myspace to web collections on 9/11, these digital archives memorialise the Web in ways that fundamentally shape our understanding of the past.In principle, they enable users to trace online communication in ways that are impossible without interventions to preserve online content that is subject to deletion, removal and neglect.Yet, at the same time the preservation of these digital traces enables their reuse in ways unforeseen by original content creators, providing the ‘algorithmic fuel’ for large language models (LLMs), machine learning and most recently, generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT and more.This talk will bring together findings from research into ‘the social life of web archives’, to highlight the significance and critical role that web archives are playing in the circulation and commodification of web data, as well as computational innovation, more broadly.The talk will chart a history of web archiving, identifying its roots in cybernetics, early AI and large-scale computing initiatives and pre-Web search and retrieval systems.Hear about the ways that data have been moving beyond the confines of web archives and into everyday life online, shaping current discourses related to trust and mis/disinformation online, privacy and the right to be forgotten.The research will underscore the myriad ways that web archives act as an organising site for the study of ‘future-making’: where practices shape what will be saved for the future, arguably change what the Web is, and give us windows into future imaginaries for what the Web could be.The seminar will be chaired by Prof Emmanouil TranosAbout the speakerDr Jessica Ogden ​is a Lecturer in Digital Futures at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Jessica received a PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on web futures and the politics of data/archives, web archiving and digital data scholarship. She was Principal Investigator on the ESRC grant-funded project ​The Social Life of Web Archives ​looking at the broader impact of web archives online and has published widely on the topic. She is also Lead for the Digital Societies Faculty Research Group.

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Saving the Web: Reflections on web archiving as future-making practice

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