Research Award
The BL Labs Research Award recognises a
project or activity which demonstrates the development of new knowledge,
research methods, or tools using the Library’s digital collections or
data.
Winner: Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians16
Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate how specific historical research
questions can be explored by analysing data from web archives.
By Tim Sherratt (Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra and founder and creator of the GLAM workbench), Andrew Jackson (Technical Lead - UK Web Archive, British Library), Alex Osborne (Technical Lead Australian Web Archive - National Library of Australia), Ben O’Brien (Technical Lead New Zealand Web Archive - National Library of New Zealand) and Olga Holownia (International Internet Preservation Coalition (IIPC) Programmes & Communications Officer)
Panel comments:
Congratulations Tim Sherratt, Andrew
Jackson; Alex Osborne, Ben O’Brien and Olga Holownia. The panel were
impressed with the quality of documentation and thought that went into
how to work computationally through Jupyter Notebooks with web archives,
which are challenging to work with because of their. These tools are
some of the first of their kind for Web Archives.
The BL Labs advisory board wanted to acknowledge and reward the incredible work of Tim Sherratt in particular.
"Tim, you have been a pioneer as ‘a
one person Lab’ over many years, and these 16 notebooks are a fine
addition to your already extensive suite in your GLAM work-bench. Your work has inspired so many in GLAMs, the Humanities community and BL Labs to develop their own notebooks".
We strongly recommend that you look
at the GLAM work-bench if you are interested in doing computational
experiments with many institutions’ data sources, we genuinely think
Tim's work has been at the forefront of computational hacking work in
GLAMs.