Ian Milligan is the Author of History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Reseach. Ian Milligan developed this work while at the University of Waterloo’s Department of History. Ian is still involved with the University of Waterloo as associate vice-president, research oversight and analysis in the universities office of research. Ian helps coordinate data management strategies and bibliometrics. His research interests include how historians can use web archives and the impact of digital sources on historical practice. Ian Milligan brings up concerns of Historical Scholarship in the Age of Abundance. His books serve as insightful books offering directory like information for the field of Historical scholarship and digital humanities. Ian explains the depth of landscape and scope of the web is. He notes the transition of materials being digitized. His main concerns lie in the validity and safety of the practice of web pages. He also expands on the role of the web archivist and the researcher. Ian thoroughly explains how this has affected the profession. Many wanting to stay brisk must up the basic skills or acquire a new basic skill such as programming languages and data analytical tools. The area of interest to me was learning about cultural analytics and big data. Search engines to archives use metadata to make documents discoverable and can often be taken for granted. Access to vast data or web archives can display how important raw data is and how the historian's role will utilize such tools and techniques. As someone who had a previous career in data analytics, the field is ever changing and constantly producing new tools and packages to make use of. I wonder if the Historian will be able to digest such a constant abundance of new tools. However, the new tools widened the scope of research and possible projects to be produced. Ian states that we can write and develop algorithms to explore text at scale, but a human still needs to figure out what that means for understanding the human condition. In my previous field of analytics, we would have access to databases. For data to be made into the database it had to be valid data. Even when working with data from a monitored database; I would not be able to trust it right away. I usually would do what we call data manipulation which involves a series of processes to clean up the data and or the script that holds the code. Cultural analytics caught my eye because i worked in the public health sector analyzing membership. I spent a lot of time with historical demographic data; which i remembered had to be cleaned up thoroughly in order for me to work with it. There was a project floating around about a new demographic dashboard. They had insights from pie chart categorized by race however their categories for race were invalid due to the setup. The mix up between race and ethnicity would affect the validity of insights being made or drawn from the chart. These insights are used to make business decisions that affect other departments. Ian mentions web archives as stewards of online data. I do like how there is a certain level of quality control on the data being taken place.

How does AI influence shape the Historians scope and role?

What is the role of the Web Archivist?

How will the growing infrastructure affect the historical scholarship economically?