Desiderata for Exploratory Search Interfaces to Web Archives in Support of Scholarly Activities

Abstract

Web archiving initiatives around the world capture ephemeral web content to preserve our collective digital memory. In this paper, we describe initial experiences in providing an exploratory search interface to web archives for humanities scholars and social scientists. We describe our initial implementation and discuss our findings in terms of desiderata for such a system. It is clear that the standard organization of a search engine results page (SERP), consisting of an ordered list of hits, is inadequate to support the needs of scholars. Shneiderman's mantra for visual information seeking ("overview first, zoom and filter, then details-ondemand") provides a nice organizing principle for interface design, to which we propose an addendum: "Make everything transparent". We elaborate on this by highlighting the importance of the temporal dimension of web pages as well as issues surrounding metadata and veracity.

Accessing web archives from different perspectives with potential synergies

“…A good overview of the related work in distant reading from the visual analytics perspective for Digital Humanities has been published by Jänicke et al [54]. Jackson et al [55] discuss the integration of distant reading features into web archive search by providing visualizations at a different zoom level. This would enable a more integrated perspective by providing access to all three views to the user.…”

The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives

“…While of interest to social scientists, they do not provide a platform for other researchers to directly work with their tools. In the United Kingdom, the 2013-15 Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities (BUDDAH) project represented a pivotal engagement and collaboration between researchers and librarians interested in facilitating access to the archived web; the series of case study projects that came out of BUDDAH have informed considerable scholarship [18] as well as the 'Shine' search interface [11]. Finally, as a book informed heavily by the BUDDAH case studies, the 2017 edited volume The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present provides a good starting point to explore various computational analyses of web archives [5].…”

What's cached is prologue: Reviewing recent web archives research towards supporting scholarly use

“…Even before starting a search, a scholar must gain an understanding of both a collection's content, scope and focus, as well as the unique material conditions and constraints of archived web artifacts. Jackson et al (2016) describe that many scholars 'don't know where to start' when approaching web archives and there is little available to guide scholars in this exploratory work. Second, the need for documentation and transparency in all steps of the process of creating and using web archives is a paramount concern.…”