TOPICS | TIMELINE | GUIDELINES FOR PROPOSALS | SESSIONS | POSTERS | WORKSHOPS & TUTORIALS | MARKETPLACE

#WhyWebArchiving

The field of web archiving has been gaining momentum for over a quarter of a century, yet the events of the past two years have shone a new light on the importance of capturing and preserving Internet content. Rapid response web archive collections around Covid-19 have demonstrated the value of web archiving. However, they have also highlighted perennial technological, ethical and legal challenges which have been recurrent themes of this conference over a period of nearly two decades. Choices, constraints, limitations and biases related to web archiving, remind us that we are potentially both effecting and affecting how the future receives the past.

#WhyWebArchiving, a title inspired by Kees Teszelszky, brings together our recurrent themes (collections, outreach, research, standards and tools) with topics related to the most recent developments in web archiving. The following example topics within six broad themes are suggestions intended to help speakers formulate ideas for presentations but are not intended to limit proposals for other topics:

FUTURE PASTS

• How are web archives framing future perceptions of the past?
• What effect do the limits, constraints, gaps and biases of web archiving have? How can we address them collaboratively?

COLLECTIONS

• Rapid response collecting: what are the new workflows and challenges?
• Social media collections: what do we collect and how? How do we address copyright and ethical issues? What are we doing about access to social media collections?
• What are we doing to address misinformation, conspiratorial content, and fake news?
• Where does web archiving hand over to other acquisition workflows, e.g. acquiring video,  oral history projects, apps, games, emerging formats?

OUTREACH

• What discussions are web archivists having with website owners, website developers, web hosting companies, and large platforms?
• What are the web archiving experiences of community groups, local historians, local libraries and self-archiving?

RESEARCH

• How are web archives being used for computational analysis and digital humanities research?
• How do we gain objectivity about web experiences through archival research?

STANDARDS

• What is new in web archiving format and metadata standards and best practices?
• Where are there gaps in standards, such as around CDX and WACZ?
• How can we standardize APIs for interoperability such as for WARC validation?

TOOLS

• How  do we maintain fidelity of content throughout the web archiving system?
• How can tools be run at scale with parallelism, clusters, and the cloud?
• How can we continue to develop tools that deal with evolving platforms and content types e.g. streaming services?
• Access: what are the latest tools and methods for providing and controlling access to web archives, e.g. warc2html, tools for WACZ?
• Crawling: what are the new strategies and considerations for collecting very large, securely maintained sites?

Timeline

About the format

The conference program will consist primarily of live Q&A sessions. We will be asking each presenter within a session to create a 10-15 minute video presentation which will be published (with password protection) on Vimeo, and accessed by registered delegates before the Conference. These videos will not be played during the conference sessions. If presentations are recorded in languages other than English, the presenters will be asked to provide captions in English.

During the live Q&A session, each participant will be asked to give a short summary of their presentation (without slides) before the program committee assigned moderator opens the Q&A. Delegates will have the opportunity to submit questions in advance of the conference and during the live session. The Q&A sessions will be in English.

In addition to a poster (in the form of one or more slides), authors of posters and demos with accompanying lightning talks will be asked to submit a short video (up to 5 minutes) which will be published on Vimeo and also played during the live poster sessions.

Guidelines for submissions

The WAC 2022 program committee invites proposals for:

• 45-minute Q&A sessions around 2-4 pre-recorded presentations
• Posters and demos with accompanying 5-minute lightning talk
• 60, 90, or 120-minute workshops
• 60, 90, or 120-minute tutorials focused on tools, technologies, or practical exercises.

All proposals must be written in English and submitted via EasyChair. Proposals should outline how their contribution advances the understanding of topics related to the conference themes, how it relates to previous work (if applicable), and what impact it may have on the community.

Proposals for:

45-minute Q&A sessions

• Must include: title and session description (up to 150 words)
  • Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the session proposer(s)
  • Titles and authors (and their organizational affiliation) of presentations included in the panel / session (2- 4 presentations)
  • Short abstracts for each of the 2-4 proposed presentations (up to 350 words per presentation)
  • Names and organizational affiliations of the speakers who will participate in the Q&A (please consider available time slots and your speakers’ time zones when inviting them to participate in your session)
• Please note that multiple proposed presentations for one session cannot be from the same institution
• Preference will be given to proposals for panels that contain contributions from first-time attendees and/or first-time presenters (please indicate first-time attendees/presenters  in your submission).
• You can use the “Proposals Marketplace” spreadsheet to seek presentations for your session.

Posters and Demos with accompanying lightning talks

• Must be submitted as an abstract of between 200 and 300 words
• Must include name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the poster author(s)
• Must include name(s) of presenters during the live poster session.

Workshops and Tutorials

• Must be submitted as an abstract of between 800 and 1,000 words
• Must include information about coordinator(s), format, target audience, anticipated number of participants, and technical requirements
• Must include details about expected outcome(s).

All submissions are due by the end of April 6th (AoE / UTC-12) 2022.

The program committee will review all submissions and send out notifications of acceptance/rejection by April 12th. For questions, please send an email to events[at]netpreserve.org.

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Sessions looking for presentations & presentations looking for sessions

This year, only proposals for full sessions of presentations will be submitted to the IIPC Program Committee for review and acceptance. This means that your presentation must be part of a session to be reviewed for acceptance to the conference unless you are submitting a proposal for a poster, workshop or a tutorial.

This spreadsheet is for matching up people interested in submitting presentations to the conference with people interested in organizing sessions. It is not monitored by the IIPC Program Committee and is not part of the official submission process.

Many thanks to the Society for American Archivists for inspiring us with their spreadsheet for connecting potential collaborators for the annual SAA meeting.

Please submit your proposals using EasyChair.

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WAC 2021 | WAC 2021 RECORDED SESSIONS | PAST CONFERENCES | #WhyWebArchiving