Mapping the UK Webspace: Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web

This paper maps the national UK web presence on the basis of an analysis of the .uk domain from 1996 to 2010. It reviews previous attempts to use web archives to understand national web domains and describes the dataset. Next, it presents an analysis of the .uk domain, including the overall number of links in the archive and changes in the link density of different second-level domains over time. We then explore changes over time within a particular second-level domain, the academic subdomain .ac.uk, and compare linking practices with variables, including institutional affiliation, league table ranking, and geographic location. We do not detect institutional affiliation affecting linking practices and find only partial evidence of league table ranking affecting network centrality, but find a clear inverse relationship between the density of links and the geographical distance between universities. This echoes prior findings regarding offline academic activity, which allows us to argue that real-world factors like geography continue to shape academic relationships even in the Internet age. We conclude with directions for future uses of web archive resources in this emerging area of research.Comment: To appear in the proceeding of WebSci 201

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

One Year Later: September 11 and the Internet

Presents findings from a survey that looks at how the terror attacks affected Americans' views about access to online information, Internet use, and the Web after September 11. Contains scholarly studies built around analysis of hundreds of Web sites

Bots, Seeds and People: Web Archives as Infrastructure

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

Blogs as a Means of Preservation Selection for the World Wide Web

Currently, there is not a strong system of selection in place when looking at preserving content on the Web. This study is an examination of the blogging community for the possibility of utilizing the decentralized and distributed nature of link selection that takes place within the community as a means of preservation selection. The purpose of this study is to compare the blog aggregators, Daypop, Blogdex, and BlogPulse, for their ability to collect content which is of archival quality. This study analyzes the content selected by these aggregators to determine if any content which is linked to most frequently for a given day is of archival quality. Archival quality is determined by comparing the content from the aggregator lists to criteria assembled for the study from a variety of archival policies and principles

Web archives: the future

T his report is structured first, to engage in some speculative thought about the possible futures of the web as an exercise in prom pting us to think about what we need to do now in order to make sure that we can reliably and fruitfully use archives of the w eb in the future. Next, we turn to considering the methods and tools being used to research the live web, as a pointer to the types of things that can be developed to help unde rstand the archived web. Then , we turn to a series of topics and questions that researchers want or may want to address using the archived web. In this final section, we i dentify some of the challenges individuals, organizations, and international bodies can target to increase our ability to explore these topi cs and answer these quest ions. We end the report with some conclusions based on what we have learned from this exercise

The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

‘Searching for District 9 in the Archives: archaeology of a transmedia Campaign’

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera. This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared. This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, commercial archives such as the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this research project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.Non peer reviewe

Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital

This article examines the changing landscape of moving image archiving in the wake of recent developments in online video sharing services such as YouTube and Google Video. The most crucial change to moving image archives may not be in regard to the collections themselves, but rather the social order that sustains cultural institutions in their role as the creators and sustainers of objectified cultural capital. In the future, moving image stewardship may no longer be the exclusive province of institutions such as archives and libraries, and may soon be accomplished in part through the work of other interested individuals and organizations as they contribute to and define collections. The technologies being built and tested in the current Internet environment offer a new model for the reimagined moving image archive, which foregrounds the user in the process of creating the archive and strongly encourages the appropriation of moving images for new works. This new archetype, which in theory functions on democratic principles, considers moving images???along with most other types of cultural heritage material???to be building blocks of creative acts or public speech acts. One might argue that the latter represents a new model for creating an archive; this new democratic archive documents and facilitates social discourse.published or submitted for publicatio

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility

OpenUCT published Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility in 2012