Bots, Seeds and People

Abstract

The field of web archiving provides a unique mix of human and automated agents collaborating to achieve the preservation of the web. Centuries old theories of archival appraisal are being transplanted into the sociotechnical environment of the World Wide Web with varying degrees of success. The work of the archivist and bots in contact with the material of the web present a distinctive and understudied CSCW shaped problem. To investigate this space we conducted semi-structured interviews with archivists and technologists who were directly involved in the selection of content from the web for archives. These semi-structured interviews identified thematic areas that inform the appraisal process in web archives, some of which are encoded in heuristics and algorithms. Making the infrastructure of web archives legible to the archivist, the automated agents and the future researcher is presented as a challenge to the CSCW and archival community.

If these crawls could talk: Studying and documenting web archives provenance

“…Further, by aligning with approaches like critical data studies, future work in web archives provenance aim for a deeper understanding of the sociotechnical system involved in production, the limitations and constraints imposed, and the workarounds and invisible labor required to sustain web archives systems. These concerns are central to the recent work of Summers and Punzalan () and Ogden et al ().…”

“…Emerging research focuses on the situated practice of web archiving and the activities that are involved in web crawling and constructing a collection. Summers and Punzalan () explore the interactions between the individuals creating web archives and the systems or automated agents used. Their work highlights that the process of selection and scoping is collaborative work between human and machine actors and requires a sociotechnical perspective.…”

Web Archiving as Culture: Tumblr and the Cultural Construction of the Archived Web

“…This research is therefore motivated by the observation that despite their positioning as critical resources for a range of scholarly Internet research agendas (Rogers, 2013) and their widespread use as tools for evidence-based accountability online, WAs remain relatively understudied. As such, recent scholarship has framed the need for further research into the practices of web archiving, arguing the inherent connections between the ways the Web is archived and our future understanding of the Web's past (Ogden et al, 2017;Summers and Punzalan, 2017).…”

All WARC and no playback: The materialities of data-centered web archives research

“…Data-centered analysis requires significant technical capacity to support web archives' large scale of data, but also requires an understanding of legal and ethical constraints, and tacit organizational practices that shape collection and use of archived web data. As a result, web archives are increasingly understood as sociotechnical infrastructures, aligning with the dimensions outlined by Bowker and Star (2000): Summers and Punzalan (2017) address the role of breakdown and repair in collecting practices; Ben-David and Amram (2018) consider how to reveal the "black boxed" processes of collecting; Ogden (2021) identifies how archiving decisions are influenced by organizational norms and membership; and, Hegarty (2022) analyzes the metaphor of "publication" for web materials relating to institutional archives built on the "installed base" of libraries.…”