1. How can computational methods help organize, represent, and retrieve non-web-native materials?

    By non-web-native materials, I refer to three overlapping categories at different levels:

    • File formats: Materials not originally structured in web markup languages (e.g., HTML), such as PDFs, images, and other non-HTML files.
    • Forms of representation: Multi-format or multimodal digital artifacts, such as library and museum objects represented through combinations of images, text, metadata, and other contextual information.
    • Origins of materials: Non-born-digital materials that have been digitized, often with varying scan quality, page layouts, and degrees of machine readability.

  2. How should we govern a “data commons”? Why, how, and if we should scrape (or archive) ALL THE INTERNET?1 And if we could establish some form of data commons, what kinds of search and recommendation systems should we build on top of it?

  3. What is the history of the Cold War information technology race, and what that might have to do with the FOSS (Free and Open-source Software) movement?

  1. I can make the case we probably should not, but I’d like to use this exaggeration as a thought experiment. ↩