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2 December: “Geographic and Linguistic Biases in Web Archives” an open lecture byAlan Colin-Arce (University of Victoria)

Next Tuesday, 2nd of December 16:15 CET, Alan Colin-Arce (University of Victoria) presents a talk on Geographic and Linguistic Biases in Web Archives as a part of the Oberseminar Series WiSe 25/26. This event accommodates a hybrid format offering an opportunity to participate online. To secure your spot, please follow the instructions on the Eventbrite platform.

About the speaker:  Alan Colin-Arce is a researcher at the University of Victoria’s Electronic Textual Culture Lab. He recently completed a master’s in sociology at the University of Victoria. He researches the influence of language and geography in knowledge production, especially in web archives and scholarly communication. He was part of one of the teams of the Archives Unleashed cohorts, working as a researcher on the project Latin American Women’s Rights Movements: Tracing Online Presence through Language, Time and Space.

Alan Colin-Arce. Image courtesy: https://alancolin.hcommons.org

The abstract of the talk is as follows:

Web archives have the potential to preserve a more diverse representation of the stories and people on the web. Despite this potential, web archives have developed geographic and linguistic biases that mirror those of traditional archives. For example, national libraries in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia have developed web archiving strategies, while most countries in the Global South rely exclusively on the Internet Archive to preserve their websites. In terms of language, English is the most prevalent language on the archived web and the primary language for web archiving tools and interfaces. At the same time, content in hundreds of languages around the world is barely archived, especially those spoken in the Global South. Given this situation, the talk will critically discuss the geographic and linguistic biases in web archives and their implications for digital history and digital humanities, including the limited availability of archived web content from the Global South and the reproduction of these biases in other technologies and research projects.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
valentinaprishchepova (November 25, 2025). 2 December: “Geographic and Linguistic Biases in Web Archives” an open lecture byAlan Colin-Arce (University of Victoria). HDSM. Retrieved March 15, 2026 from https://hdsm.hypotheses.org/6673


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