By Seyf-el Islem Nader<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Early Scholars Spring School on Web Archives<\/a> was held for the second time at the KBR Museum<\/a> in Brussels on April 20th<\/sup>, 2026, after a first successful session in 2024 in Paris. Both editions of the event took place during the annual web archiving conferences (WAC) organized by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)<\/a>. This year\u2019s edition was organized by digital historians Val\u00e9rie Schafer<\/a> from the University of Luxembourg and Ian Milligan<\/a> from the University of Waterloo, as well as Emmanuelle Bermes<\/a> from the \u00c9cole nationale des chartes PSL (Universit\u00e9 Paris lettres et sciences). The concept aims to engage early scholars interested in web archives in various discussions about the field. As a 2nd<\/sup> year PhD student from Aix-Marseille Universit\u00e9, I was one such early scholar\u2014albeit with an indirect connection to web archiving\u2014so I signed up for the event. The insights that this Spring School provided complemented a series of answers to questions that sometimes I was not even aware I had, throughout my PhD research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this blogpost, I will share several reflections from my experience at the Early Scholar Spring School, as well as the questions that pushed me to consider exploring at the end. But first, it is important to lay out the perspective from which I approached this Spring School. My research is not on web archives, nor within history more broadly. My PhD thesis<\/a> is in the field of Anglophone media and cultural studies, specifically on the impact of American science-fiction adaptations on audiences\u2019 perceptions of ecological issues. I have only learned about the existence of this Spring School through a doctoral course I enrolled in, titled \u201cLe Web comme source ou terrain en SHS : apprendre \u00e0 utiliser le web pr\u00e9sent ou archiv\u00e9 dans le cadre de son doctorat\u201d (The Web as a Source or Field in Social Science and Humanities: Learning to use the live or archived web in doctoral research<\/em>). This series of workshops is organized by Sophie Gebeil<\/a>, a contemporary historian from TELEMMe laboratory, as part of the courses offered by l\u2019Ecole Doctorale 355 (Doctoral School 355: Spaces, Cultures, Societies<\/em>), within the broader activities of the WebLab<\/a>, a space co-created by Sophie Gebeil and Jean-Christophe Peyssard<\/a> and dedicated to the study of the archived web and new media at Aix-Marseille Universit\u00e9. The wide scope of the course\u2019s title is what attracted me to it since, to do my audience reception analysis, I decided to computationally analyze a large corpus of online reviews, and these workshops offered an opportunity to train and gain familiarity with knowledge and methods involved in using the web in research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, my perspective within this Spring School and the conference in general aligns with that of researchers with a connection to the web more broadly\u2014not web history or web archives specifically. Just like the WebLab course, I was impressed by the range and variety in the profiles that attended this Spring School. Attendees worked on projects with various relationships to web archives, from those who actively participate in web archiving and web historians, to researchers working more on the analysis of the live web including myself. One of the activities in the program had even included discussions within subgroups that were thematically arranged around:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond introducing us to thematically similar projects, these discussions allowed us to raise questions that directly relate to our particular connection to web archives. As my focus was on computational analysis and data handling, a question that interested me particularly was on the technical skills required to work within web archives. This echoed a similar question I was asked within the WebLab course, as I was able to produce a corpus\u2014a collection of online film reviews\u2014that I could only compile using some tools I developed via Python. My answer to this question was tentatively affirmative, as I can only be certain about the necessity of developing technical skills in my specific engagement with web archiving, not to the field as a whole. In my case, there was no real way around learning the basics of coding that would allow me to scrape the reviews I needed from the film review website I was studying, notably IMDB (Internet Movie Database).<\/a> The process involved creating a script that can reliably scrape all of the reviews found in a film\u2019s webpage. I designed it so that it could also capture the metadata that comes with the reviews needed for my research (usernames, display names, number of likes, date of publication, date of collection). This required the study of the website\u2019s HTML to target the data I need, as well as Python libraries (like Selenium) which helped me collect the data in real-time by simulating a browser activity. The tool functioned similarly to Browsertrix<\/a> that was introduced in the WebLab course with the exception that it collects specific data from a webpage (in CSV form) instead of the entire page. The script can work with any film on IMDB and is shared on GitLab via this link<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The collective discussion we had next in the Spring School helped complement the answer. The organizers of the event agreed that regardless of the specific needs of a project, a minimum level of technical proficiency seems to be inevitable as long as we work with the web. This, it was argued, is primarily imposed by the unstable nature of the web that makes it challenging to provide accessible tools that can be used universally and reliably. This was indeed behind my earlier hesitant conclusion on the matter, as the challenges I have faced in my own collection process\u2014wide variety of web structures, dynamic mechanisms, platform changes, protection measures, and more\u2014make it nearly impossible to apply my tools beyond my specific use case and web source, at this particular time. Not all academic engagement with the web requires technical proficiency at this level, but we agreed that there needs to be a minimum and, more importantly, a willingness to adapt to the web\u2019s instability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On this note, the question of artificial intelligence, particularly LLMs, was also raised. Professor Val\u00e9rie Schaffer argued that such tools are seriously limited as \u201csubstitutes\u201d for the acquisition of the technical skills required in the field. She cited the aforementioned instability factor but also the vulnerability and even danger of relying on tools, the mechanisms of which we do not fully understand. This echoed the perspective I already had on the issue. From my own experience, AI tools can at best serve as assistants in developing the technical skills required in the field, but such a learning process is absolutely fundamental and cannot be replaced by AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question of artificial intelligence was mentioned earlier in our roundtable discussion following the BelgicaWeb<\/a> Symposium that took place in the morning. This concluding symposium presented the results of the two-year project that aims to make Belgium\u2019s digital heritage accessible and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The panel consisted of experts from different fields\u2014Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Law, and Library Practice\u2014who walked us through the different aspects of the project as well as their workflow from selection of the archived content all the way to data enrichment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In contrast to our earlier point of discussion, this symposium made it a point to go beyond the technical dimension of their project and so emphasized how it is also a legal, institutional, and user-oriented archiving process. This, as stated by the project\u2019s legal expert Elodie Lecroit, was mainly driven by two factors: one is that, unlike France, Belgium lacks a clear legal-deposit<\/a> framework for digital content in which a more mature web-archiving regime can be anchored, and another is that the European copyright exception for preservation by cultural heritage institutions<\/a> cannot be invoked if the protected content is not already part of the institution\u2019s collection. This apparently has pushed the project to create collections with a controlled scope and metadata (around 2000 URLs only). The question of artificial intelligence arose as the team explained their use of LLMs in the process of data enrichment of the metadata of the collections. This invited a discussion on the role of AI in web-archiving, in which attendees suggested its use in the description of images as another form of metadata, or as a tool on the user\u2019s end that helps them navigate the collected archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These discussions helped me put into perspective what I have learned so far from my courses at the WebLab. On the methodological front, I could closely see how a project on web archiving is handled in more practical terms. For example, the panel explained that they used Browsertrix in conserving the websites needed for their collections. This illustrated to me the utility of such tools in the work of archiving organizations on a global level, well beyond a more limited use for a small PhD research project. That is not to say it was not insightful in that regard either. The next step in my thesis project is to analyze the textual data of film reviews I have gathered, and this panel\u2019s workflow brought to my attention that enhancing the gathered data should be part of the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conversely, the legal and institutional web archiving scene in Belgium helped me develop a fuller understanding of the challenges that the field faces on an international level. The stark contrast in scope between the collections of this project and web archiving practices in France, mainly the legal deposit by the Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France<\/a> (BnF) or L\u2019institut National de l\u2019audiovisuel<\/a> (INA), has clearly shown that we are not yet there in terms of a solid web archiving infrastructure across different countries. We could indeed see a wide variety and inconsistency in the maturity of the archiving frameworks through not only this France\/Belgium comparison but also between other countries that were present in the Spring School, namely Canada, Luxemburg and Switzerland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n