Computational Research with Art on the Web: CARTA Whitepaper and Research Datasets
October 25th, 2023
by the Community Programs team
The Collaborative Art Archive (CARTA) is excited to announce the publication of CARTA: Promoting Computational Research with Art on the Web and CARTA Collection Research Datasets. The whitepaper introduces CARTA’s approach to promoting computational use of web archive collections, and the research datasets are openly available for reuse at archive.org. These datasets were generated with ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub) from CARTA collections and were used in computational research workshops across North America and Europe. Tutorials for conducting computational research with the datasets are available in the ARCH Help Center. Development of the workshops, the whitepaper, CARTA collections, and CARTA research datasets was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the Consortial Action to Preserve Born-Digital, Web-Based Art History & Culture project.
About CARTA
To date, CARTA members have preserved and made accessible over 900 web-based art resources, totaling over 13 TB of data with continued growth. In addition to providing unified access to CARTA’s collaborative collecting effort through the CARTA website (https://carta.archive-it.org/), CARTA has promoted the research potential of CARTA collections through a series of workshops and virtual trainings focused on computational research with web archive data.
CARTA demonstrates the power of collaborative approaches to web archiving, achieving collection scale that would not be possible individually, leveraging complementary resources and expertise. CARTA continues to collaborate and collect, and is excited to welcome more art libraries and mission-aligned organizations to the collaborative to expand the reach of collecting activities and computational use of born-digital art resources on the web.
If you want to learn more about CARTA, please join us on November 8th at 11:00 AM Pacific Time for an informational session or reach out to us at carta@archive.org. During the November event, we will outline CARTA’s mission and goals, how to get involved, and what’s in store for the future of the collaborative. We hope to see you there!