WebData Research Infrastructure Project Launched

The effort to build a research infrastructure for studying the Norwegian Web Archive has officially started. Over the next four years, we will build an infrastructure that allows researchers to access, search, and analyse web data dating back to the turn of the millennium.

In the initial phase, the project will establish a test platform for searching, exploring, and retrieving data. At the same time, a mapping of researchers’ needs will be carried out, with particular focus on the types of metadata, tools, and methods they require. The results will in turn guide further development of the platform.

Partners and support from the Research Council of Norway

The project is led by the National Library of Norway (NB), with the Norwegian Computing Center (NR), the University of Oslo (UiO), and UiT The Arctic University of Norway as partners. The Research Council of Norway (NFR) supports the project with funding.

Read more about the project and the different work packages.

Broad support from the research community

For the application to the Research Council, submitted in 2023, we received a lot of supportive statements from leading researchers in their fields, both in Norway and internationally. Some of them are included here:

TThe project is a major and necessary leap forward for researchers, as well as Norwegian society and culture at large.

The infrastructure will give our researchers the opportunity to study digital narratives on the web over time.

The development of WebData can be of great value for research on Norwegian culture and politics.

Scholarly access will open up new and unforeseen opportunities in the humanities and social sciences […] with the possibility of applying a wide range of digital methods.

A user-friendly research infrastructure for web data could become a groundbreaking resource that brings Norwegian humanities and social sciences to the forefront of research in history, sociology, language, politics, and the media phenomena of our own time.