Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The Disintegration Loops:  Generational Loss in Web Archives Michael L. Nelson As part of the Internet Archive's Information Stewardship Forum (March 18–20, 2026), I decided to use my five minute lightning talk to raise the issue of generational loss in web archives.  Or more directly, making copies of copies (...of copies…) – something that web archives currently do not do well.  My title is based on William Basinski 's four volume release " The Disintegration Loops ", in which he played the audio tapes of "found sounds", recorded decades earlier, in loops , with the whole process lasting over an hour.  The effect is hauntingly beautiful, with each loop slightly degrading the magnetic tape, resulting in a generational loss.  The degradation of each loop is right on the edge of the just-noticeable difference , until the entire track is reduced to just a shadow of its former self. I first discussed this topic in my 2019 CNI closing keynote ( slide 88 ), w...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed nearly every field. Today, we can access and train models that generate text, images, sound, video, and code. This transformation is reshaping how we think, analyze, and preserve information. Yet, despite the rapid growth of AI, its use for analyzing web archive content seems to advance at a slower pace.  Web archiving is the process of collecting, preserving, and providing access to web content over time, where a memento  represents a previous version of a web resource as it existed at a specific moment in the past. Much of the recent work within the web archiving community (e.g., [1] , [2] , [3] ) has focused on making the archiving process itself more intelligent, integrating AI into tasks such as web crawling, storage optimization, and metadata generation. In contrast, the application of AI to the analysis of already archived web content has received comparatively less attention. This gap represents a great opportunity for innov...

IEEE BigData 2025-The10th Computational Archival Science (CAS) Workshop Home Page The 10th Computational Archival Science (CAS) Workshop  is part of  2025 IEEE Big Data Conference (IEEE BigData 2025) . It was an online workshop held on Tuesday December 9, 2025. It included close to 70 participants, with a keynote from Dr. Phang Lai Tee, National Archives of Singapore and Chair of the UNESCO Memory of the World Preservation Sub-Committee on Artificial Intelligence, and 18 papers from 27 institutions in 8 countries spanning 5 continents: Canada, USA (North America) / Brazil (South America) / Scotland, Spain, Switzerland (Europe) / South Africa (Africa) / Korea (Asia). Michael Kurtz, who passed on December 17th, 2022   launched the CAS initiative in 2016 , with Victoria Lemieux, Mark Hedges, Maria Esteva, William Underwood, Mark Conrad, and Richard Marciano. The 10th CAS workshop was organized by the CAS Workshop Chairs:  Mark Hedges from King’s College Lond...