This National Forum on Ethics and archiving the Web (#eaw18) will take place at the New Museum in New York City and will consider how web archives can better serve their publics and historical records. It will run from march 22 to 24th 2018 and will be open to the public.
The dramatic rise in the public’s use of the web and social media to document events presents tremendous opportunities to transform the practice of social memory.
Web archives can serve as witness to crimes, corruption, and abuse; they are powerful advocacy tools; they support community memory around moments of political change, cultural expression, or tragedy. At the same time, they can cause harm and facilitate surveillance and oppression.
As new kinds of archives emerge, there is a pressing need for dialogue about the ethical risks and opportunities that they present to both those documenting and those documented. This conversation becomes particularly important as new tools, such as Rhizome’s Webrecorder software, are developed to meet the changing needs of the web archiving field.
The National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web (#eaw18) will bring together activists, librarians, journalists, archivists, scholars, developers, and designers to talk about how to create richer, non-oppressive web archives—archives that will better serve their publics and the historical record.
