28^th April 2022 – 09:30 to 13:30 UK

Hosted by University of Edinburgh (Centre for Research Collections and Centre for Data, Culture, and Society)

Virtual – Open, Free to Attend

Book your place https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/archive-of-tomorrow-health-misinformation-on-the-web-tickets-293789350857

Aims of the Workshop:

• Introduce the project and project team to relevant stakeholders
• Present motivations and aims (including scope and issues of evaluating dis- or misinformation)
• Gather web resources and subjects of interest
• Recruit participants in user needs analysis

Intended audience: researchers and students in health information or related fields, researchers and students in web archiving or related fields, archive or other information professionals, health professionals, IT professionals or software engineers developing technology in related areas

Format: Presentations, Breakout Rooms, Discussion, Feedback, Case Studies

Event Description

How will future generations understand the COVID-19 pandemic and learn from the lessons we watch unfold online on a daily basis? What happens to all that information (and misinformation) –health advice, government guidelines, heated debates – published on the web as the years pass by?

The Archive of Tomorrow project welcomes you to join us for a half-day of discussion and consultation on the archiving of 10,000 websites in the UK Web Archive on the topic of health information. A 12-month pilot project funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the project aims to build an evidence base about health information shared online to support current and future research on public health, the spread of mis/information, community responses to the pandemic and lockdown, and other potential research topics. The project team – including NLS, Cambridge University Library, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University, and the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh – invites participants to learn about the project and feedback on how the collection might best support different research approaches.

After a briefing on the project and its aims, participants will be assigned to breakout groups where they will respond to the vital but challenges questions at the centre of this project – how do we describe archived websites that may contain offensive or inaccurate information? How do we contextualise archived websites so that current and future users can evaluate relevance and reliability? The programme will also include overviews of recent research using web resources or focusing on health information online. Before the workshop closes, the project team wants to hear from participants about potential research questions and collecting approaches that might inform this project as it develops. 

Draft Programme

09:30 Joining & Networking

09:45 Welcome & Introduction to Archive of Tomorrow 

10:00 Overview of Workshop from Chair

10:10 Challenges to Archiving Health Information and Misinformation on the Web – Speaker TBD

10:30 Breakout Rooms – Led by Project Team Members

Examples discussion questions: How should misinformation be documented? Should archives collect misinformation? How can web archives make collections more accessible and usable? What types of research questions do web archives support?

11:15 Feedback to Group

11.45 Comfort Break

12:00 Research Case Study, History of the British welfare state and methodologies around the history of the World Wide Web by Gareth Millward, University of Southern Denmark (SDU)

12:15 Research Case Study, TBA

12:30 Q&A

12.45 Feedback (Mentimeter) – User Needs Analysis / Proposed Research Questions / Expressions of Interest

13:15 Closing Remarks

13.30 Close

More about the project

https://www.nls.uk/about-us/working-with-others/archive-of-tomorrow/