Appraisal Talk in Web Archives

  • Ed Summers

Abstract

The Web is a vast and constantly changing information landscape that by its very nature seems to resist the idea of the archive. But for the last 20 years, archivists and technologists have worked together to build systems for doing just that. While technical infrastructures for performing web archiving have been well studied, surprisingly little is known about the interactions between archivists and these infrastructures. How do archivists decide what to archive from the Web? How do the tools for archiving the Web shape these decisions? This study analyzes a series of ethnographic interviews with web archivists to understand how their decisions about what to archive function as part of a community of practice. It uses critical discourse analysis to examine how the participants’ use of language enacts their appraisal decision-making processes. Findings suggest that the politics and positionality of the archive are reflected in the ways that archivists talk about their network of personal and organizational relationships. Appraisal decisions are expressive of the structural relationships of an archives as well as of the archivists’ identities, which form during mentoring relationships. Self-reflection acts as a key method for seeing the ways that interviewers and interviewees work together to construct the figured worlds of the web archive. These factors have implications for the ways archivists communicate with each other and interact with the communities that they document. The results help ground the encounter between archival practice and the architecture of the Web.

RÉSUMÉ

Le Web est un paysage informationnel vaste et en changement constant qui, par sa nature même, semble s’opposer à l’idée de l’archive. Pourtant, depuis les vingt dernières années, les archivistes et technologues ont travaillé de concert afin de bâtir des systèmes qui feraient exactement ça. Bien que les infrastructures technologiques pour archiver le Web ont été abondamment étudiées, on en sait étonnamment peu à propos des interactions entre les archivistes et ces infrastructures. Comment les archivistes décident de ce qui sera archivé du Web? Comment les outils d’archivage du Web modèlent leurs décisions? La présente étude analyse une série d’entretiens ethnographique avec des archivistes du Web afin de comprendre comment leurs décisions concernant ce qui doit être archivé s’articulent en fonction d’une communauté de pratique. Elle utilise l’analyse critique du discours pour examiner comment l’utilisation du langage par les participants joue un rôle dans leurs processus de prise de décision d’évaluation. Les résultats suggèrent que les politiques et le positionnement des archives sont reflétés dans la manière dont les archivistes parlent de leurs réseaux de relations personnelles et organisationnelles. Les décisions d’évaluation sont l’expression des relations structurelles d’une archive et des identités de l’archiviste, qui sont forgées au cours des relations de mentorat. L’introspection agit comme méthode essentielle pour voir la façon dont les intervieweurs et les interviewés travaillent de concert pour construire les mondes façonnés des archives du Web. Ces facteurs ont des répercussions sur les façons dont les archivistes communiquent entre eux et interagissent avec les communautés qu’ils documentent. Ces résultats aident à ancrer la rencontre entre la pratique archivistique et l’architecture du Web.

Author Biography

Ed Summers

Ed Summers is research faculty at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. He is also a PhD candidate in the College for Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Ed’s research interests currently centre on issues related to archives and memory as they intersect with science and technology studies. Previously, Ed worked for eight years as a software developer in the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress, where he helped develop the National Digital Newspaper Program and the Linked Data Service for publishing name and subject authority data on the Web. Prior to that, he worked at Old Dominion University, the University of Illinois, and Columbia University, where he focused on the use of metadata in information services.

Archivaria 89 cover: image of Hon Lu with his cousin, Shanobi Lam
Published
2020-05-10
How to Cite
Summers, Ed. 2020. “Appraisal Talk in Web Archives”. Archivaria 89 (May), 70-103. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13733.
Issue
Archivaria 89 (Spring 2020)
Section
Articles

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