The Web Archives for Historical Research Group is happy to announce that we’ve received a $20,000 USD Microsoft Azure Research award. We’ll be using their HDInsight Spark service to run Warcbase jobs on our large collections, including selected Archive-It and Internet Archive data.

One of our bottlenecks in our work has been processing time, and the ability to have a dedicated Spark cluster will let us engage in both exploratory research, as well as the sustained processing to help make our research projects a reality.

Our sincerest thanks to Microsoft Research, as well as the University of Waterloo’s Arts Advancement Office and Principal Gifts team for facilitating the application.