At the heart of my research is a fundamental attentiveness to the ways that knowledge is shaped by the sociotechnical practices used to record and preserve the past. From documenting human rights abuses to studying algorithmic discrimination in online advertising, the transience and availability of the Web in its various forms is an increasingly important topic of debate within the public sphere. Web archives (WAs) - broadly conceived as any attempt to capture and preserve the Web for future use - are evermore central to this issue, providing tools for accessing parts of the Web that have been subject to neglect, removal or state and platform-based forms of content moderation and censorship. My research re-situates WAs as 'places' of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, by implicating both people and technologies in the shaping of the 'politics of ephemerality’ that lead to the creation, maintenance and use of the Web's past. My recent work has therefore focused on three intersecting strands of concern related to the role of archivists and archival technologies in shaping contemporary Web history: 1) the invisible labour involved in the creation and maintenance of web and data archives; 2) the power, politics and ethics of 'saving the Web'; and 3) the methodological opportunities and challenges presented by WAs for studying digital life online.