Biography:
Ian Milligan (PhD, York, 2012) is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Since 2017, he has been the principal investigator of the Archives Unleashed Project, an interdisciplinary project that aims to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past. Operating at the intersection of history, computer science, and library/information studies, Milligan's research explores how new technology changes how we both capture our cultural record and then access it at scale. His latest monograph, History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web
is Transforming Historical Research (2019), was recently published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Reflecting this interdisciplinary focus, Milligan has an extensive track record of service to both the profession and the university. He serves on Library and Archives Canada's Acquisition Advisory Committee (2015 – Present), the Canadian Research Knowledge Network's Preservation and Access Committee (2018 – Present), the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Steering Committee (2019 – Present), and has also sat on review committees for SSHRC, CFI, New Frontiers in Research Fund, and Compute Canada. At the University of Waterloo, Milligan has served as a faculty senator (2017 – present), as well as a member of the Arts Faculty Tenure & Promotion Committee (2017 – present) and the university's Honorary Degrees Committee (2019 – present). In 2016, he was awarded the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award and in 2019 he received the Faculty of Arts' Excellence in Research award.