This week we looked at archiving the web. I explored some flash backs to the past like Pacman and Windows 3.1. I was definitely taken back to my childhood with my mother playing solitaire in the kitchen. Archiving the web is fantastic for time travel. We can create whole worlds within our computers and never feel like we left a decade.
I also tried the Wayback machine. Now I am not sure if I am using it wrong but I did find that some younger websites that I tested did not give much detail at all. Even though some sites were created in 2013-2014 the earliest date I could get was around mid 2015 and even these snapshots didn’t display images and fonts. I wonder if the website builder used for individual websites has something to do with how these sites are archived in the wayback machine. I tested some older sites and while they could take me back to 2004, the captures were pretty much blank until I reached 2015.
Web archiving is certainly something that needs wide attention for historical records. Although it does create an individual and perhaps moral conundrum for people who want something removed from their website for reasons such as character deformation, wrong information being displayed, mismatched facts etc. The old saying that ‘once something is on the web, it is there forever’, really comes to mind.
The twitter archive not only has archival benefits for historical records but also trend migration. I see the use of TAGS being archived very helpful when exploring the way news travels and what topics are popular at different times. Combine this with real world news events and we have the start of a map for how news and events influences behaviour.
