UK Web Archive Research Articles

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

The Past Web: Exploring Web Archives

Queering the web archive: A xenofeminist approach to gender, function, language and culture in the London French Special Collection

Based on the author’s experience of curating a collection of migrant community web objects within the UK Web Archive, this paper combines conceptual interrogation with empirical analysis. The central premise is that the incorporation of multilingual, diasporic micro-archives serves to queer the anglophone UK Web Archive, or “patriarchive”, by dismantling steadfast binaries and implicit postcolonial hegemonies. The article challenges Jacques Derrida’s contention that the mal d’archive is the result of the archive’s ‘troubling’ duality, and posits, on the contrary, that such boundary-crossings are the very incarnation of a positive, transgressive form of xenofeminism (XF). From the dualism at the origin of the archive itself, to that comprised in the concept of genre/gender, and from the spatiotemporal in-betweenness of the archived diasporic (web)site to the translanguaging present therein, the article demonstrates how the diasporic micro-archive is the embodiment of a non-binary, trans-inclusive XF ideology. Taking French migrant women’s blogs preserved in the London French Special Collection as a primary source and examining their transformation over time, the paper explores how blog repurposing can be apprehended as a technomaterialist XF act and how the blogs’ increasing multimodal translanguaging bears witness to a form of culturo-linguistic transitioning that transcends binary hybridity.

Impact assessment indicators for the UK Web Archive

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study to examine, determine and propose the optimal approach to develop impact assessment indicators for the UK Web Archive.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses the existing literature on impact assessment frameworks for digital resources and the types of impact in related fields to set an approach to develop an impact assessment plan. Primarily drawing from the Balanced Value Impact Model, the approach consists of three stages: context setting, indicator development and indicator evaluation.FindingsThe development of a set of potential impact assessment indicators for the UK Web Archive shows not only an optimal approach for the development but also recommendations for web archiving organisations.Research limitations/implicationsThe research did not carry out follow-up interviews regarding the feedback from UK Web Archive's staff. Adoption of the new set of indicators will further this development.Practical implicationsThe staff's duties influence their prioritisation of the indicators, so discussions among partners will be helpful in recognising different perceptions, unnoticed strengths and potential values. A progressive accumulation of assessment and improvements from the current state and small regular evaluations will be also helpful to demonstrate the impact and value to the stakeholders in the future.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a set of 13 potential indicators for the UK Web Archive of which functionality was checked against set quality criteria and tested through semi-structured interviews and survey submissions with the UK Web Archive staff members.

DUKweb, diachronic word representations from the UK Web Archive corpus

Lexical semantic change (detecting shifts in the meaning and usage of words) is an important task for social and cultural studies as well as for Natural Language Processing applications. Diachronic word embeddings (time-sensitive vector representations of words that preserve their meaning) have become the standard resource for this task. However, given the significant computational resources needed for their generation, very few resources exist that make diachronic word embeddings available to the scientific community. In this paper we present DUKweb, a set of large-scale resources designed for the diachronic analysis of contemporary English. DUKweb was created from the JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996–2013), a very large archive which collects resources from the Internet Archive that were hosted on domains ending in ‘.uk’. DUKweb consists of a series word co-occurrence matrices and two types of word embeddings for each year in the JISC UK Web Domain dataset. We show the reuse potential of DUKweb and its quality standards via a case study on word meaning change detection.

\u2018Go fish\u2019: Conceptualising the challenges of engaging national web archives for digital research

Our work considers the sociotechnical and organisational constraints of web archiving in order to understand how these factors and contingencies influence research engagement with national web collections. In this article, we compare and contrast our experiences of undertaking web archival research at two national web archives: the UK Web Archive located at the British Library and the Netarchive at the Royal Danish Library. Based on personal interactions with the collections, interviews with library staff and observations of web archiving activities, we invoke three conceptual devices (orientating, auditing and constructing) to describe common research practices and associated challenges in the context of each national web archive. Through this framework we centre the early stages of the research process that are often only given cursory attention in methodological descriptions of web archival research, to discuss the epistemological entanglements of researcher practices, instruments, tools and methods that create the conditions of possibility for new knowledge and scholarship in this space. In this analysis, we highlight the significant time and energy required on the part of researchers to begin using national web archives, as well as the value of engaging with the curatorial infrastructure that enables web archiving in practice. Focusing an analysis on these research infrastructures facilitates a discussion of how these web archival interfaces both enable and foreclose on particular forms of researcher engagement with the past Web and in turn contributes to critical ongoing debates surrounding the opportunities and constraints of digital sources, methodologies and claims within the Digital Humanities.

Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive

In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin. The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK web space. This is achieved through an annual domain crawl, first undertaken in 2013, in addition to more frequent crawls of key websites and specially curated collections which date back as far as 2005. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. This commentary will explore a number of questions including: what heritage is captured and what heritage is instead neglected by the UK Web archive? What heritage is created in the form of new data and what are its properties? What are the ethical issues that memory institutions face when developing these web archiving practices? What transformations are required to overcome such challenges and what institutional futures can we envisage?

Reviewing football history through the UK Web Archive

ABSTRACTThe UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK webspace. This aim is achieved through an annual domain crawl, in addition to frequent crawls of selected websites and specially curated collections. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. Sport and in particular football, make up a large section of the UK webspace. For this reason, the UK Web Archive started a curated collection on these subjects in autumn 2017. This article acts as a guide to the collections, using football as an example of the type of research that can be done, rather than a critical analysis of contemporary collection policies or the examples highlighted. It is hoped that this article will increase the use of the UK Web Archive and lead to a further review of how the sports studies field adapts as well as engages with digital resources.

Archiwa Internetu jako nowe bazy źródłowe

The article contemplates Internet archives as specific creations dedicated to various Web archiving projects. The Author presents several examples of such initiatives: the Internet Archive, the PANDORA Archive, the UK Web Archive, the CyberCemetery, and the ’09 European Election Web Harvesting Project. On the ground of these examples, as well as the definition of Internet archive, the Author attempted to characterise the phenomenon by listing elements that comprise an Internet archive. Finally, he presented possible criteria for their classification, as well as some reflections on their capabilities and research potential.

Tracing the online development of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces through the UK web archive

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the method and results of research using web archives to explore the development of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Armed Forces websites. The methodology shows how an initial corpus was created and analysed to establish the purpose of the MoD and Armed Forces websites. Visual hierarchy design, thematic content analysis, and an understanding of website design were used to contextualise online content. Recruitment content is shown to have been a chief concern of the Armed Forces websites throughout the period, particularly for the British Army. Changes in recruitment terminology and the increased employment of interactive content are examined. It is argued that the greater use of content such as videos was not the result of a change in approach towards recruitment but an adoption of the increased capabilities of websites. The importance of the MoD and Armed Forces websites as a means of influencing public opinion is established and the Army's development of its website as a communication channel is explored. Link analysis was used to investigate the central position of the MoD campaign Supporting Britain's Reservists and their Employers in the visualisation of the .mod.uk domain and the Territorial Army's attempts to recruit personnel for the Army Medical Service.

Format technology lifecycle analysis

The lifecycles of format technology have been a defining concern for digital stewardship research and practice. However, little evidence exists to provide robust methods for assessing the state of any given format technology and describing its evolution over time. This article introduces relevant models from diffusion theory and market research and presents a replicable analysis method to compute models of technology evolution. Data cleansing and the combination of multiple data sources enable the application of nonlinear regression to estimate the parameters of the Bass diffusion model on format technology market lifecycles. Through its application to a longitudinal data set from the UK Web Archive, we demonstrate that the method produces reliable results and show that the Bass model can be used to describe format lifecycles. By analyzing adoption patterns across market segments, new insights are inferred about how the diffusion of formats and products such as applications occurs over time. The analysis provides a stepping stone to a more robust and evidence‐based approach to model technology evolution.

Big Web data, small focus: An ethnosemiotic approach to culturally themed selective Web archiving

This paper proposes a multimodal ethnosemiotic conceptual framework for culturally themed selective Web archiving, taking as a practical example the curation of the London French Special Collection (LFSC) in the UK Web Archive. Its focus on a particular ‘community’ is presented as advantageous in overcoming the sheer scale of data available on the Web; yet, it is argued that these ethnographic boundaries may be flawed if they do not map onto the collective self-perception of the London French. The approach establishes several theoretical meeting points between Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotics, notably, the foregrounding of practice and the meaning-making potentialities of the everyday; the implications of language and categorisation; the interplay between (curating/researcher) subject and (curated/research) object; evolving notions of agency, authorship and audience; together with social engagement, and the archive as dynamic process and product. The curation rationale proposed stems from Bourdieu’s three-stage field analysis model, which places a strong emphasis on habitus, considered to be most accurately (re)presented through blogs, yet necessitates its contextualisation within the broader (diasporic) field(s), through institutional websites, for example, whilst advocating a reflexive awareness of the researcher/curator’s (subjective) role. This, alongside the Kressian acknowledgement of the inherent multimodality of on-line resources, lends itself convincingly to selection and valuation strategies, whilst the discussion of language, genre, authorship and audience is relevant to the potential cataloguing of Web objects. By conceptualising the culturally themed selective Web-archiving process within the ethnosemiotic framework constructed, concrete recommendations emerge regarding curation, classification and crowd-sourcing.

Sources and Resources Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health.

With the migration of the written record from paper to digital format, archivists and historians must urgently consider how web content should be conserved, retrieved and analysed. The British Library has recently acquired a large number of UK domain websites, captured 1996–2010, which is colloquially termed the Dark Domain Archive while technical issues surrounding user access are resolved. This article reports the results of an invited pilot project that explores methodological issues surrounding use of this archive. It asks how the relationship between UK public health and local government was represented on the web, drawing on the ‘declinist’ historiography to frame its questions. It points up some difficulties in developing an aggregate picture of web content due to duplication of sites. It also highlights their potential for thematic and discourse analysis, using both text and image, illustrated through an argument about the contradictory rationale for public health policy under New Labour.

Access and Scholarly Use of Web Archives

This article provides an overview of current access arrangements of web archives. Using data from a user survey of the UK Web Archive, it attempts to analyse the reasons for limited scholarly use of web archives. It also examines the key characteristics of scholarly use of digital sources and translates these into a set of requirements for web archives. It discusses how current web archives fail to meet the evolving scholarly requirements, offering some thoughts on a way forward, from the perspective of a national research library and a web archiving service provider.

New medium, old archives? Exploring archival potential in The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive

This article speculates about the new kinds of historical information that performance scholars may be able to preserve as a result of recent innovations in web archiving. Using The Live Art Collection of the UK Web Archive as its case study, the article draws on influences from oral history, new media theory and the digital humanities. Beginning with an assertion that the Web has a tendency to aggregate existing media forms into one archival location, the article makes the case that online writing is key to web archiving's potential to document new kinds of knowledge about performance and live art. Subsequently it points to limitations in the current archival structures of the collection and concludes that further innovation is required in order to maximize the scholarly potential of the material contained within it. Interviews with the team who manage and curate the collection are used throughout to support assertions about the collections intended use and functions.