New blog post: Prof. Dr. Daniel Göler writes about the construction and use of web archives

Political science research would be inconceivable without data from websites and social media platforms. The scholarly debate on their use focuses predominantly on the problems of evaluating the exorbitantly increased volumes of data. Less attention is paid to the challenge of the fluidity of web-based data and the resulting problems of their documentation and archiving. Against this background, this blog post discusses the experiences of an interdisciplinary DFG project (with the participation of library science, digital humanities, and political science) on the construction and use of web archives. The focus is not on concrete solution options, but rather on highlighting the diverse and complex problems that Internet-based data pose at the level of data archiving and archive use, which increasingly require new skills from political scientists, both in using existing web archives and in conducting and archiving their own case study-related event crawls.

DOI: 10.34879/gesisblog.2022.58