WAC 2024 Call for Proposals

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The call for papers is now closed. Thank you for your submissions!

WAC 2024 Call for Proposals: "Web Archives in Context"

This year we invite submissions that focus on the broader context in which we collect, preserve and provide access to historical websites and social media. This broader context includes the fields of digital preservation, other digital as well as analog collections, tools and platforms we use for preservation and analysis, the increasing expectations to use collections as data, post-custodial frameworks, ecological sustainability of digital repositories, barriers to collecting social media, and new legal and ethical frameworks. We would also like to see proposals that explore web archiving in the context of new developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Web archives have already been used to train AI models, but we are also interested in exploring ways in which AI and ML can further enhance existing web archiving workflows and better support researchers.

Looking closer to home, this call for proposals also encompasses the recurring web archiving topics that focus on our more immediate contexts. The curatorial decisions we make, the tools and workflows we use, and our quality assurance practices all affect what we are able to capture. The expertise available to us, as well as the level of integration between our web archiving tools and preservation systems, our organizational mandates, and our long-term commitments all determine how well we can preserve our web archives. Our ability to understand and meet researcher requirements, our legal and ethical frameworks, how well the content is described, and the quality of our discovery and access platforms all impact our ability to provide meaningful access to web archives. 

The following example topics are intended to help formulate ideas for submissions on the broader and more immediate context surrounding web archiving, but are not intended to limit proposals for other topics:

DIGITAL PRESERVATION 

  • Integrating web archives with preservation systems
  • Sustainability in web archival collection (e.g. policies around sustainability of specific resources) 
  • Greener approaches to preserving web archives
  • Requirements for the next version of the WARC standard
  • Best practices for long-term preservation of WARC files
  • Technical metadata extraction and content analysis of WARC files for digital preservation purposes
  • Keeping up with the live web: how do we retain the significant characteristics of the original archived web content when storage or replay requires contemporary technology?

CURATION

  • Building collections & exhibits
  • Making web archives more connected with other collections (e.g. curating web archives in concert with analog collections and other digital formats; integrating web archived content into digital libraries)
  • Sharing metadata across heritage entities or cultural data collections
  • Ethical and legal issues in the curation of web archival collections
  • Post-custodial web archives or empowering creators of web-based content to be stewards of their own archives
  • Strategies for collecting from social media platforms 
  • Supporting curators and users who look at traumatic content

TOOLS & WORKFLOWS

  • What is “state of the art” in tools and workflows at all stages of the web archiving lifecycle?
  • Interoperability among web archiving tools and with other tools and platforms 
  • Tools development driven by user studies
  • Models for open source development and sustaining communities
  • Quality Assurance (QA) processes in a legal and ethical context
  • QA concepts, tools, and walkthroughs (What is quality? How do we measure it? What do we measure? And when is it “good enough”?)

RESEARCH & ACCESS

  • Unrealized business and technical requirements for web archives research (What are we not doing that we could be doing as web archivists to assist?)
  • Creating & providing researchers with datasets from web archives collections
  • Existing and new uses of analysis tools on web archives
  • Web archive datasets in the context of 'Collections as Data' and 'GLAM Labs' movements
  • Applying good research data practices to web archives such as FAIR and CARE principles, PIDs, open licenses, research data management policies, etc.
  • Collaborations between researchers and web archivists
  • Educating and training future users of web archives

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) & MACHINE LEARNING (ML)

  • How can AI or ML be used in web archiving (e.g. to improve harvesting or QA, extract/generate metadata, classify content such as image classification, perform anomaly detection, improve search)?
  • Developing AI models using web archives through collaborations or partnerships
  • Current and emerging laws related to using AI or ML for web harvesting
  • Legal and ethical frameworks for the application of AI to web and social media archives

TIMELINE 

CFP open 

24 July 2023

CFP closes

28 September 2023

CFP review period

1 October - 10 November 2023

Notifications issued

13 November 2023

Draft program ready

7 February 2024

Registration opens

7 February 2024

Registration closes

10 April 2024

WAC in-person

24-26 April 2024

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All proposals must be written in English and submitted via ConfTool. In addition to the submission-specific requirements below, proposals should outline how their contribution advances the understanding of topics related to the conference theme, how it relates to previous work (if applicable), and what impact it may have on the conference attendees. All proposals should be accompanied by 3 to 5 keywords.

15-minute presentations with 5-minute Q&A

  • Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
  • Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
  • Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.

Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:

  • Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the presentation author(s)
  • Name(s) of presenters during the live session.

60-minute panels

  • Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words
  • Must include: title and panel description 
    • Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation(s) of the panel proposer(s)
    • Name(s) of panelists during the live session, and the moderator
    • If presentations will be included, short abstracts for each of the presentations 
    • Examples of the questions that will be discussed by the panelists
  • Please make sure to allocate a minimum of 30 minutes for the discussion
  • Please note that multiple panelists cannot be from the same institution

Workshops and tutorials

  • Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words
  • Must include information about coordinator(s), format (workshop or tutorial), target audience, anticipated number of participants, ideal length (60 or 80 minutes), and technical requirements
  • Must include details about expected learning outcome(s)

Posters 

  • Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
  • Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
  • Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.

Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:

  • Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the poster author(s)
  • Name(s) of presenters during the live session.

5-minute lightning talks

  • Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words
  • Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
  • Abstract should not include names or affiliations of presenters. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.

Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:

  • Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the author(s)
  • Name(s) of presenters during the live lightning talk session.

All submissions are due before September 28th (AoE / UTC-12) 2023.

The program committee will review all submissions and send out notifications of acceptance/rejection by November 13th. For questions, please send an email to events[at]netpreserve.org.

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