Conference Agenda

The rise of Jupyter notebooks and particularly Google Colab has created an easy to use and accessible platform for those interested in exploring computational methods. This is especially the case with performing research using web archives. However the question remains, how to start? In particular, for those without an extensive background in programming this might be an insurmountable challenge. Enter the All Our Yesterdays Took Kit. (AOY-TK) This suite of notebooks and associated code provides a scaffolded introduction to opening, analyzing, and generating insights with web archives. With tight integration to Google Drive and text analysis tools, it provides a comprehensive solution to that very question of how to start. Development of AOY-TK is made possible by grant funding and this session will discuss progress to date and provide some brief case study examples of the types of analysis possible using the toolkit.

Academic faculty members may change their institution affiliation over the course of their career. In the case of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States, which make substantial contributions to the preparation of Black professionals, retaining the most talented Black students and faculty from moving to non-HBCUs (thus preventing “brain drain”) is often a losing battle. This project seeks to investigate the effects of academic mobility at the institutional and individual level, measuring the potential brain drain from HBCUs. To accomplish this, we consult web archives to identify captures of academic institutions and their departments in the past to extract faculty names, title, and affiliation at various points in time. By analyzing the HBCUs’ list of faculty over time, we will be able to model academic migration and quantify the degree of brain drain.

This NSF-sponsored project is in the early stages of execution and is a collaboration between Drexel University, Howard University, University of Tennessee - Knoxville, and University of Wisconsin - Madison. We are currently in the data collection stage, which entails us leveraging an open source Memento aggregator to consult international sources of web archives to potentially improve the quality and quantity of captures of past versions of HBCU sites. In this initial stage, we have encountered caveats of the process of efficient extraction, established a systematic methodology of utilizing this approach beyond our initial use cases, and identified potentially ethical dilemmas of individuals’ information on the past being uncovered and highlighted without their explicit consent. During the first year of the project, we have refined our approach to facilitate better data quality for subsequent steps in the process and to emphasize recall. This presentation will both describe some of these nuances of our collaborative project as well as highlight the next steps for identifying brain drain from HBCUs by utilizing web archives.