Collecting Primary Sources from
                        Web Archives: A Tale of Scarcity and Abundance

Nanni, Federico

doi:10.4135/9781526470546.n9

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…On the one hand, born-digital materials, digital archives, and computational methods allow us to study how social movements use Internet technologies to network, disseminate messages, build community, and recruit new members. On the other hand, we are often frustrated by both the abundance and scarcity of data, especially for historical research (Nanni, 2019). While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a "revolution" in how social movements communicate and organize -for instance, through connective action (Bennet & Segerberg, 2013) -digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a "revolution" in how we study these movements or their histories (Nanni, 2019).…”

Section: Alexis De Coning West Virginia Wesleyan Collegementioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, we are often frustrated by both the abundance and scarcity of data, especially for historical research (Nanni, 2019). While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a "revolution" in how social movements communicate and organize -for instance, through connective action (Bennet & Segerberg, 2013) -digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a "revolution" in how we study these movements or their histories (Nanni, 2019).…”

Section: Alexis De Coning West Virginia Wesleyan Collegementioning

confidence: 99%

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Using “Small Data” to Map How Men’s Rights Came Online (Work-in-Progress)

De Coning

2023

SPIR

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While the advent of the Internet can be seen as a “revolution” in how social movements communicate and organize, digital methods and materials do not necessarily constitute a “revolution” in how we study movements or their histories. My paper enters this discussion by suggesting a "small data" approach for studying the early digital presence of the men’s rights movement, and its transition from print to digital media. I compare two unique data sets involving print and digital archives to map out the geographical locations of men's rights groups and adherents in the early 1990s. I demonstrate how: 1) there is significant overlap between the print organizations and early digital spaces for men's rights activists; and 2) men’s rights communities in North America were often concentrated in areas like Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the North Eastern Seaboard. Ultimately, I argue that print materials, “small data,” and non-computational methods are still valuable tools to study social movements and their early digital histories.

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Section: Alexis De Coning West Virginia Wesleyan Collegementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Alexis De Coning West Virginia Wesleyan Collegementioning

confidence: 99%

Using “Small Data” to Map How Men’s Rights Came Online (Work-in-Progress)

De Coning

2023

SPIR

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“…While there is a promise of 'unprecedented abundance of primary sources for diachronically tracing, examining and understanding major events' there is paradoxically also the real threat that a majority of web-based sources vanish. 24 Already in 2003, digital historian Roy Rosenzweig acknowledged the risk that in the near future historians would simultaneously experience both a digital Dark Age and overload of information. 25 Constructing a collection about YouTube's early history is a good example of this paradox.…”

Section: Web Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding Traces in YouTube’s Living Archive: Exploring Informal Archival Practices

Aasman

2019

TMG

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This article addresses the challenges that media historians face when they aim to reconstruct the early history of YouTube. Since the platform is constantly adapting its policies, there is a great level of uncertainty as to what is still there or what is no longer traceable. Therefore, addressing the question if and/or how YouTube can be understood as an archive is crucial and, in addition, the issue of how YouTube related content can be used as historical sources. Although many people, including media scholars, treat YouTube like an online open access archive, there are reasons to be cautious. The article will explore strategies dealing with formal but also with informal web archival practices. These informal archival practices concern users who curate early YouTube videos, user profiles and comments or even old layout versions of the website. Developing methods that critically acknowledges user-generated archival practices, and uses the insights of early generation of users' reconstructions of the platform's history, even if it might seem anecdotal evidence, can lead to deeper knowledge of that early community. By actively participating in reconstructing YouTube's recent past these users shape nostalgic narratives while they also collect and share useful information that guide historians finding new traces.

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Web archive analytics: Blind spots and silences in distant readings of the archived web

Donig

Eckl

Gassner

et al. 2023

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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In this article, we discuss epistemological and methodological aspects of web archive analytics, a recent development towards more data-centred access to web archives. More specifically, we suggest understanding both the process of archiving and subsequent steps of analysis at scale as acts of observation that can be questioned for their epistemological priori. Therefore, we propose the concepts of ‘blind spots’ (features of the live web not included upon creation in the archive) and ‘silences’ (latent features present in the archive but requiring a particular method to be made articulate). In particular, we address two forms of silences playing a structural role in web archive analytics, crucial to both historians and social scientists alike: abundance (or scale) and time. We trace epistemological implications of web archive analytics across an exemplary case study workflow and suggest methodological answers to the issues raised in this process. On the data extraction side, we introduce warc2corpus (w2c), a new tool for extracting granular, structured data, especially temporal information related to the creation, modification, and publication specifically of webpages. For data analysis, we demonstrate how distant reading techniques—more specifically structural topic modelling (STM)—can contribute to providing a rich, temporally structured representation of textual web archive content that in turn can be subjected to scholarly inquiry, interpretation, and re-contextualization.

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Collecting Primary Sources from Web Archives: A Tale of Scarcity and Abundance

Abstract: La diversité des témoignages historiques est presque infinie.

Cited by 4 publications

References 29 publications

Using “Small Data” to Map How Men’s Rights Came Online (Work-in-Progress)

Using “Small Data” to Map How Men’s Rights Came Online (Work-in-Progress)

Finding Traces in YouTube’s Living Archive: Exploring Informal Archival Practices

Web archive analytics: Blind spots and silences in distant readings of the archived web

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