Ian Milligan

Keynotes & Media

Keynotes

  1. 2026 “What the AI Won’t Tell You: Absence and the Architecture of Trust.” GLOW-Ready: Getting Government Archives GenAI-Ready, LUSTRE Network, online, June.
  2. 2026 “The Legibility of Absence: From the Finding Aid to the Language Model.” Digitisation of Scholarly Knowledge Through the Prism of Research Practices, University of Lille, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France, May.
  3. 2025 “Exploring Digital Terror: Using the September 11 Digital Archive for Historical Research.” Real-Time History: Engaging with Living Archives and Temporal Multiplicities, Washington, DC, March.
  4. 2023 “Interpreting the Web: The Critical Role of Historical Context in Web Archival Research.” Le Web: Source et Archive, University of Lille, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France, April.
  5. 2022 “The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age.” 5th Digital History in Sweden Conference: Abundance in a Digital Age, Lund, Sweden, November.
  6. 2021 “Digitized Newspapers as Everyday Interdisciplinarity: The Transformation of Historical Scholarship.” NewsEye Conference, Paris, France, March. Delivered remotely.
  7. 2021 “The Transformation of History in the Digital Age.” Nugent Lecture, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, February. Delivered remotely; also gave two graduate workshops.
  8. 2020 “You Shouldn’t Need to be a Web Historian to Use Web Archives.” WARCNet, Aarhus, Denmark, April. Delivered remotely.
  9. 2019 “Working with Cultural Heritage at Scale: Developing Tools and Platforms to Study the Age of Abundance.” Featured talk, LaTeCH-CLfL 2019 (part of NAACL 2019), Minneapolis, MN, June.
  10. 2018 “From Archiving to Analysis: Current Trends and Future Developments in Web Archive Use.” Archiving the Web?, Hilversum, Netherlands, October.
  11. 2018 “Web Archives and History.” Association of Canadian Archivists Annual Meeting, Edmonton, AB, June.
  12. 2018 “Big Data and History (or ‘How this Historian Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Data’).” SFU Library Love Your Data Week 2018, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, February.
  13. 2017 “Learning to Collaborate (or why you should hang out with librarians).” Digital Pedagogy Institute 2017, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, August.
  14. 2016 “Archives Unleashed: Unlocking Born-Digital Sources through Interdisciplinary Collaboration.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, May.
  15. 2015 “Lost in the Infinite Archive? Web Archives for Historical Research Today… and Tomorrow.” Web Archives 2015: Capture, Curate, Analyze, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, November.

Selected Invited Lectures

  1. 2026 “My Robot Research Assistant Occasionally Lies—And Soon the Archives Will Too.” Beyond the Hype: AI in Qualitative and Historical Research, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, May.
  2. 2026 “How the Web Learned to Remember: Averting the Digital Dark Age, 1996–2001.” WebLab Conference, Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, Aix-en-Provence, France, April.
  3. 2026 “AI and Historical Research: Evidence and Argument in the Age of Generated Text.” Department of History, University of British Columbia, April.
  4. 2026 “AI and Historical Research: Evidence and Argument in the Age of Generated Text.” Canadian Historical Association Webinar, February.
  5. 2025 “From Inbox to Archives: Reading 9/11’s Digital Traces.” Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, November.
  6. 2024 “Learning and Researching with AI: Engaging Critically as Individuals and Society.” Enoch Turner Schoolhouse Foundation, Toronto, May.
  7. 2021 “From Archives to Servers: How the Internet has Transformed Historical Scholarship.” Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (virtual), April.
  8. 2016 “Making Sense of Web Archives.” Library of Congress, Washington, DC, June.
  9. 2016 “Historians and the Impending Big Data Deluge.” National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, June.
  10. 2015 “Between Content and Metadata.” British Library, London, October.

Public Writing

  1. 2022“Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter has placed its user-generated archives in danger.” The Conversation.
  2. 2020“Will Covid-19 become the 21st century’s forgotten pandemic?” The Globe and Mail. With Esyllt Jones and Shelley Sweeney.
  3. 2020“2020 is a year for the history books, but not without digital archives.” The Conversation.
  4. 2020“Interdisciplinary scholarship needs to be normalized within professions.” University Affairs.
  5. 2019“Don’t despair if your teen wants to major in history instead of science.” The Conversation.
  6. 2019“Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age.” The Conversation.
  7. 2016“The Problem of History in the Age of Abundance.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  8. 2014“Does History Matter?” Literary Review of Canada.
  9. 2013“Archives: Preserve Our Digital Heritage.” Nature.

Podcasts & Video

Podcasts & Radio

  1. 2025The Web’s Fragile Memory: Ian Milligan on Digital Preservation. The Tattooed Historian Show.
  2. 2025Averting the Digital Dark Age (with Brewster Kahle & Ian Milligan) Future Knowledge (Internet Archive).
  3. 2024Averting the Digital Dark Age. New Books Network.
  4. 2022History of the Internet. At This Moment with Jim Jeffries and Amos Gill.
  5. 2022History Slam 10th Anniversary Special: Life as Historians (segment with Ian Milligan) History Slam (ActiveHistory.ca).
  6. 2020Ian Milligan Discusses His Book 'History in the Age of Abundance?'. AHR Interview (American Historical Review).
  7. 2012Introducing the History Slam Podcast: First Episode (with Ian Milligan) History Slam (ActiveHistory.ca).

Videos

  1. 2024Averting the Digital Dark Age (IIPC WAC 2024 talk) IIPC Web Archiving Conference.
  2. 2021The Undoing of History. TVO – The Agenda with Steve Paikin.
  3. 2021Are we all Digital Historians now? Technology and Historical Practice (Nugent Lecture) Queen’s University.
  4. 2021Digitized Newspapers as Everyday Interdisciplinarity (Keynote Panel) NewsEye 2021.
  5. 2020You shouldn’t need to be a web historian to use web archives (WARCnet Keynote) WARCnet.
  6. 2019Ian Milligan on the Usage of Web Archives in Research. Internet Archive – Community Webs.