Ian Milligan

Research

Network graph of hyperlinks in a web archive collection, with clusters around twitter.com, facebook.com, and youtube.com
Hyperlink network drawn from a web archive collection

Ian Milligan’s research explores how web archives and other born-digital traces can be used as historical evidence, and how they are transforming historical practice. His work sits at the intersection of history, archival studies, and digital infrastructure, spanning computational methods, large-scale digital preservation, and the cultural history of the internet. From 2017 to 2023 he was principal investigator of the Archives Unleashed project, now offered as a service by the Internet Archive, and he is co-editor of the journal Internet Histories.

His current book project, “On Every Screen” (working title), is a history of how ordinary people used the early internet to make sense of the September 11th attacks. It is supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025–2029).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  1. 2024 Ian Milligan. “From Policy to Practice: The Evolution of SSHRC Application Processes, 1979–Present.” Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation 36.1: 66–86.
  2. 2022 Nick Ruest, Samantha Fritz, Ian Milligan. “Creating Order from the Mess: Web Archive Derivative Datasets and Notebooks.” Archives and Records 43:3: 316–331.
  3. 2021 Esyllt W. Jones, Shelley Sweeney, Ian Milligan, Greg Bak, Jo-Anne McCutcheon. “Remembering is a Form of Honouring: Preserving the COVID-19 Archival Record.” FACETS 6:1: 545–568.
  4. 2021 Samantha Fritz, Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest, Jimmy Lin. “Fostering Community Engagement through Datathon Events: The Archives Unleashed Experience.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 15:1.
  5. 2021 Nick Ruest, Samantha Fritz, Ryan Deschamps, Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan. “From Archive to Analysis: Accessing Web Archives at Scale through a Cloud-Based Interface.” International Journal of Digital Humanities 2: 5–24.
  6. 2020 Ian Milligan. “We Are All Digital Now: Digital Photography and the Reshaping of Historical Practice.” Canadian Historical Review 101:4: 602–621.
  7. 2020 Samantha Fritz, Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest, Jimmy Lin. “Building Community at a Distance: A Datathon During COVID-19.” Digital Library Perspectives 36:4: 415–428.
  8. 2018 Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan, Christoph Becker. “If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 69:10: 1223–1233.
  9. 2018 Gabriel A. Devenyi, Rémi Emonet, Rayna M. Harris, Kate L. Hertweck, Damien Irving, Ian Milligan, Greg Wilson. “Ten Simple Rules for Collaborative Lesson Development.” PLOS Computational Biology 14:3: e1005963.
  10. 2017 Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan, Jeremy Wiebe, Alice Zhou. “Warcbase: Scalable Analytics Infrastructure for Exploring Web Archives.” ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 10:4: 22:1–22:30.
  11. 2016 Ian Milligan. “Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 10:1-2: 78–94.
  12. 2016 Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest, Anna St-Onge. “The Great WARC Adventure: Using SIPS, AIPS and DIPS to Document SLAAPs.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 6.
  13. 2015 Ian Milligan. “‘A Haven for Perverts, Criminals, and Goons’: Children and the Battle for and Against Canadian Internet Regulation, 1991–1999.” Histoire Sociale / Social History 47:96: 245–274.
  14. 2013 Ian Milligan. “Illusionary Order: Online Databases and the Changing Foundation of Canadian Historiography, 1997–2010.” Canadian Historical Review 94:4: 540–569.
  15. 2013 Ian Milligan. “Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 23:2: 21–64. Winner of the 2013 JCHA Best Article Prize.
  16. 2011 Ian Milligan. “Coming off the Mountain: Forging an Outward Looking New Left at Simon Fraser University.” BC Studies 171: 69–91.
  17. 2011 Ian Milligan. “‘This Board Has a Duty to Intervene’: Challenging the Spadina Expressway Through the Ontario Municipal Board, 1963–1971.” Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine 39:2: 25–37.
  18. 2010 Ian Milligan. “‘The Force of All Our Numbers’: New Leftists, Labour, and the 1973 Artistic Woodwork Strike.” Labour / Le Travail 66: 37–71.
  19. 2008 Ian Milligan. “Sedition in Wartime Ontario: The Trials and Imprisonment of Isaac Bainbridge, 1917–1918.” Ontario History 100:2: 150–177.

Book Chapters

  1. 2021 Ian Milligan. “How to Use Digital Tools: Data Mining.” In Adam Matthew Digital: Research Methods, Primary Sources.
  2. 2018 Ian Milligan, Tom J. Smyth. “Studying the Web in the Shadow of Uncle Sam: The Case of the .ca Domain.” In The Historical Web and Digital Humanities, Routledge, 45–63.
  3. 2018 Ian Milligan. “Learning to ‘See’ the Past at Scale.” In Seeing the Past with Computers, University of Michigan Press, 116–136.
  4. 2018 Ian Milligan. “Historiography and the Web.” In SAGE Handbook of Web History, SAGE, 3–15.
  5. 2018 Ian Milligan. “Exploring Web Archives in the Age of Abundance: The Case of GeoCities.” In SAGE Handbook of Web History, SAGE, 344–358.
  6. 2018 Ian Milligan, Robert Warren. “Big Data and the Coming Historical Revolution: From Black Boxes to Models.” In Big Data in the Arts and Humanities, CRC Press, 65–76.
  7. 2017 Ian Milligan. “Welcome to the Web: The Online Community of GeoCities During the Early Years of the World Wide Web.” In The Web as History, UCL Press, 137–158.
  8. 2015 William J. Turkel, Ian Milligan. “The Challenge of ‘High-Throughput’ Computational Methods.” In From Big Bang to Global Civilization: A Big History Anthology, Primus Books, 145–157.

Peer-Reviewed Conference Publications

  1. 2022 Helge Holzmann, Nick Ruest, Jefferson Bailey, Alex Dempsey, Samantha Fritz, Peggy Lee, Ian Milligan. “ABCDEF: The 6 Key Features Behind Scalable, Multi-Tenant Web Archive Processing with ARCH.” Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 1–11.
  2. 2020 Nick Ruest, Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan, Samantha Fritz. “The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 157–166.
  3. 2020 Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan, Douglas W. Oard, Nick Ruest, Katie Shilton. “We Could, but Should We? Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections.” Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR CHIIR, 135–144.
  4. 2019 Ryan Deschamps, Samantha Fritz, Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest. “The Cost of a WARC: Analyzing Web Archives in the Cloud.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 261–264.
  5. 2019 Ian Milligan, Nathalie Casemajor, Samantha Fritz, Jimmy Lin, Nick Ruest, Matthew S. Weber, Nicholas Worby. “Building Community and Tools for Analyzing Web Archives through Datathons.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 265–268.
  6. 2016 Emily Maemura, Christoph Becker, Ian Milligan. “Understanding Computational Web Archives Research Methods Using Research Objects.” IEEE Big Data Workshop in Computational Archival Science, 3250–3259.
  7. 2016 Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest, Jimmy Lin. “Content Selection and Curation for Web Archiving: The Gatekeepers vs. the Masses.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 107–110.
  8. 2016 Andrew Jackson, Jimmy Lin, Ian Milligan, Nick Ruest. “Desiderata for Exploratory Search Interfaces to Web Archives in Support of Scholarly Activities.” Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 103–106.

Research Funding

Grants (CAD $2,861,294 total; CAD $2,477,041 as PI)

As Principal Investigator (PI)

  • SSHRC Insight — “Digital Terror: The September 11th, 2001 Attacks Online.” CAD $75,543. 2025–2029.
  • SSHRC Connection — “Building an Inter-Institutional and Cross-Functional Research Data Management Community: From Strategy to Implementation.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: Alison Hitchens, Jennifer Abel. CAD $22,258. 2023–2024.
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — “Integrating Archives Unleashed Cloud with Archive-It.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: Jimmy Lin, Nick Ruest, Jefferson Bailey. CAD $1,084,087. 2020–2023.
  • UW AI Institute & Microsoft (AI for Social Good) — “MANNERSS: Multilingual Adaptation for NER in the Social Sciences.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: Jimmy Lin. CAD $25,000. 2020–2021.
  • SSHRC Insight — “Averting the Digital Dark Age: The Digital Preservation Movement, 1991–2001.” CAD $97,602. 2020–2023.
  • SSHRC Connection — “Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: Chad Gaffield. CAD $11,779. 2018–2019.
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — “Archives Unleashed Project.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-PIs: Nick Ruest, Jimmy Lin. CAD $610,625. 2017–2020.
  • Microsoft Research — Microsoft Azure Research Award (“Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge”). CAD $26,804 (USD $20,000). 2016–2017.
  • Compute Canada — Research Platforms & Portals (“Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge”). PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: Nick Ruest. CAD $11,635. 2016–2019.
  • SSHRC Insight — “A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996–2014.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-Is: Nick Ruest, William Turkel. CAD $257,541. 2015–2020.
  • Ontario MRI — Early Researcher Award (“A Longitudinal Analysis of the Canadian World Wide Web as a Historical Resource, 1996–2014”). CAD $150,000. 2015–2020.
  • SSHRC Connection — “Unlock Your Web Archives Hackathon.” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-Is: Jimmy Lin, Matthew Weber, Nathalie Casemajor, Nicholas Worby. CAD $23,715. 2015–2016.
  • SSHRC Insight Development — “An Infinite Archive?” PI: Ian Milligan; Co-I: William Turkel. CAD $74,952. 2013–2015.
  • UW / SSHRC Institutional Block Grant. PI: Ian Milligan. CAD $5,500. 2013–2015.

As Partner / Co-Investigator

  • IMLS — Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (“Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving”). PIs: Zhiwu Xie, Edward Fox; Partners: LANL Research Library, ODU Computer Science, University of Waterloo (History), Internet Archive, GWU Libraries. CAD $314,824 (USD $248,451). 2018–2020.
  • AHRC (UK) — “Born-Digital Data and Methods for History and the Humanities.” PI: Jane Winters; Co-I: Tobias Blanke; Partners: The National Archives (UK), University of Cambridge, University of Sussex, British Library, University of Waterloo (Ian Milligan), Webster Research & Consulting. CAD $60,125 (£32,210). 2016–2017.
  • SSHRC Connection — “New Directions in Active History: Institutions, Communication, and Technologies.” PI: Thomas Peace; Co-Is: Ian Milligan, Jim Clifford, Daniel Ross, Kaleigh Bradley, Krista McCracken, Andrew Nurse. CAD $19,304. 2015–2016.

Private-Sector Funding

  • Start Smart Labs — Gift Agreement to the Internet Archive. Researchers: Jefferson Bailey, Ian Milligan, Jimmy Lin. USD $30,000. 2020–2023.
  • Start Smart Labs — Gift Agreement to the University of Waterloo. Researchers: Ian Milligan, Jimmy Lin. USD $90,000. 2018–2020.