Averting the Digital Dark Age
How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory
IAN MILLIGANFRHistS
Historian of the Digital Age
Author of Averting the Digital Dark Age (JHU Press, 2024).
“Milligan creates something that is undoubtedly a history, but which at times has a journalistic writing style without losing academic rigor ... the book offers a deep and important story about the efforts to preserve the early web.”
“History in the Age of Abundance? represents a detailed manual for rethinking the historical discipline to train new scholars to deal with the new formats of born-electric text, their preservation, and their scale.”
About Ian
Ian Milligan (he/him) is a digital historian and Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, where he is currently serving as a full-time academic administrator.
Milligan’s research explores how web archives and other born-digital traces can be used as historical evidence and how they are transforming historical practice. His most recent book, Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory (Johns Hopkins, 2024), builds on earlier monographs: The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age (2022), History in the Age of Abundance (2019), and Rebel Youth (2014). He also co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data (2015) and co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018). From 2017 to 2023 he was principal investigator of the Archives Unleashed project, now offered as a service by the Internet Archive, and he is co-editor of the journal Internet Histories. Currently, he sits on several advisory boards such as the Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Advisory Committee and the UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) board.
Milligan currently serves as Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Analysis at Waterloo, providing campus leadership for research integrity and compliance. His portfolio includes the Office of Research Ethics, safeguarding research, inclusive research, research health & safety, bibliometrics, emergency research issues, and campus research awards. He co-led the university’s Research Data Management strategy and continues to support its implementation.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives in Waterloo, Ontario, with his partner and two children.
The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age
Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope, 2nd Edition
Co-authored with Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart, and Kim Martin
