We are pleased to announce the next talk in the ETCL Nuts and Bolts series, which will take place on Thursday, November 6th, to mark World Digital Preservation Day.
This session will feature Alan Colín-Arce, the ETCL’s Mitacs Internship Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship, who will discuss the inherent biases in the web archives that underpin much of our work in digital history and the digital humanities.
Event Details
- Speaker: Alan Colín-Arce (Mitacs Research Fellow, ETCL)
- Date: Thursday, November 6, 2025
- Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST)
- Location: ETCL, UVic Libraries, (McPherson Library, 3rd Floor, Room A314)
- Registration: Not required
About the Talk: “Silences as Data: Geographic and Linguistic Biases in Web Archives”
Web archives have the potential to preserve a more diverse representation of the stories and people on the web. Despite this potential, web archives have developed geographic and linguistic biases that prevent this representativeness. For example, national libraries in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia have developed web archiving strategies, while most countries in the Global South rely exclusively on the Internet Archive to preserve their websites. In terms of language, English is the most prevalent language on the archived web and the primary language for web archiving tools and interfaces.
Given this situation, the talk will critically discuss the geographic and linguistic biases in web archives and their implications for digital history and digital humanities, including the limited availability of archived web content from the Global South and the reproduction of these biases in other technologies and research projects.
About the Speaker
Alan Colín-Arce is a Mitacs research fellow in open, collaborative scholarship at the University of Victoria’s Electronic Textual Culture Lab. He recently completed a master’s in sociology at UVic. He researches the influence of language and geography in knowledge production, especially in web archives and scholarly communication. He was also part of one of the teams of the Archives Unleashed cohorts, working as a researcher on the project Latin American Women’s Rights Movements: Tracing Online Presence through Language, Time and Space.
We welcome all interested members of the community to join the discussion. As with previous sessions, there will be time for questions, and conversation can continue informally afterwards.