‘Misinfo Weekly’ Re-blog: Web archives, misinformation and the Wayback Machine

Dr Jessica Ogden

This is a re-blog of a recent episode of Misinfo Weekly, a podcast on misinformation hosted by Michael Simeone and Shawn Walker (Arizona State University). In this episode, the podcast interviews Jessica Ogden - a Senior Research Associate in Sociology and Digital Society RG member at the University of Bristol. The interview centres on Jessica’s research on the significance and future implications of web archives, and specifically how they relate to problems of both studying and intervening in mis- and disinformation online. The episode gives some background on how the Web is archived and the variety of institutions and online communities doing this work, as well as the sociotechnical challenges of preserving the Web for the future. For more on this research, see Jessica’s university research profile.

Episode Details

Content on the internet is always changing in quiet and subtle ways. Without the ability to track how the internet has changed, it's difficult to get a read on trends in misinformation. In this episode, we interview Dr. Jessica Ogden about the web archiving, and we get her take on important methods and uses for web archives. We discuss how web archives are created by both memory institutions such as libraries as well as hacker collectives like ArchiveTeam. We also discuss the race to archive platforms such as Parler and NSFW Tumblr as they shut down. Dr. Ogden is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Fellow at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute.