Data-Driven Approaches to Studying the History of Museums on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities for New Discoveries

Data-driven approaches applied to research in the humanities offer extensive opportunities to analyze large volumes of data and gain new knowledge and insights. Web archives serve as valuable resources for analysis of the development of the websites and even the entire domains through the decades, providing access to historical data. This research focuses on applying data-driven approaches to the web history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Australia. Utilizing the Internet Archive and the Australian Web Archive, the study examines the opportunities and challenges in extracting and analyzing large datasets from these sources. Key challenges include the complexities of obtaining datasets, dealing with incomplete or biased data, and the inherent difficulties in analyzing diverse data formats like text, images, and multimedia. The research highlights the importance of digital research infrastructures, such as the GLAM Workbench and Archives Research Compute Hub, in addressing these challenges and facilitating robust analysis. The study demonstrates the potential of data-driven methodologies to offer new insights into the evolution of museums’ online presence while also underscoring the complexities involved in the research process.