Ancient History of the UK Web
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This document summarizes past and recent web archive activities conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). It describes projects from 2008-2015 funded by JISC, AHRC, and IIPC that involved analyzing large web archive datasets capturing the UK domain. These projects extracted metadata, links, and temporal data from over 30TB of archived web pages to study topics like the growth of UK universities online and how government and media presence has changed over time. Current work includes additional case studies and making the processed UK domain data openly available to support research on the history and evolution of the British web space.
Ancient History of the UK Web
- 1. Ancient History of the UK Web With support by and thanks to Ning Wang and Adham Tamer Josh Cowls, Scott A. Hale, Helen Margetts, Eric T. Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, Taha Yasseri
- 2. Past Web Archive Activities at OII • 2008-2009. JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration: World Wide Web of Humanities (Jisc & NEH funded) – OII, Internet Archive, Hanzo Archives – Meyer, E.T., Carpenter, K., Middleton, M. (2009). World Wide Web of Humanities: Final Report to JISC. Online: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/humanitiesfinalrepor t.pdf • 2010. Researcher Engagement with Web Archives (Jisc funded) – OII, VKS – Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T., Madsen, C., van den Heuvel, C., Thomas, A., Wyatt, S. (2010). Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art. London: JISC. Online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1714997 and http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/544/ – Thomas, A., Meyer, E.T., Dougherty, M., van den Heuvel, C., Madsen, C., Wyatt, S. (2010). Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: Challenges and Opportunities for Investment. London: JISC. Online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1715000 and http://ie- repository.jisc.ac.uk/543/ – Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T. (2014). Community, Tools, and Practices in Web Archiving: The state of the art in relation to social science and humanities research needs. Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23099/abstract • 2011. Using Web Archives: A Futures Perspective (IIPC funded) – OII – Meyer, E.T., Thomas, A.J., Schroeder, R. (2011). Web Archives: The Future(s). London: IIPC. Online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1830025
- 3. Recent Web Archive Activities at OII • 2013-2015: Jisc Big Data project (Jisc funded) – OII, British Library – Prepare and release hyperlink corpus • 2014-2015: Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities (AHRC funded) – IHR, OII, British Library – Supporting researchers in Arts & Humanities to use web archive data – Producing edited book of empirical studies concerning the history of the UK web • First paper from these combined projects – Hale, S.A., Yasseri, T., Cowls, J., Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R., Margetts, H. (2014, July). Mapping the UK webspace: Fifteen years of British universities on the web. ACM WebSci’14, Bloomington, Indiana. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2435481 or http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2856
- 4. Big Data: Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset for Social Science Research This project aims to enhance JISC's UK Web Domain archive, a 30 TB archive of the .uk country-code top level domain collected from 1996 to 2010. It will extract link graphs from the data and disseminate social science research using the collection. February 2012 - February 2014
- 5. Taming a mammoth: Web Archive Dataset Preparation 30 TB compressed data 6.2TB metadata and links 2.5 TB temporal links
- 6. 30 TB compressed data in (w)arc format – Approx. 4.5 million files – Mix of binary and plain text payloads along with header data – Two formats: old arc and newer warc Housed at the BL, access restrictions
- 7. WARC/1.0 WARC-Type: response WARC-Target-URI: http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-blogs,guardiangu-news,guardiangu- network/1/H.22.2/56938?ns=guardian&pageName=Prisoner+of+war+camps+in+the+UK+mapped+and+listed.+Download+the+d ata%3AGraphic%3A1476560&ch=News&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=History+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CSecond+world+war+ %28News%29%2CGermany%2CUK+news%2CTechnology&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Simon+Roger s&c7=10-Nov- 08&c8=1476560&c9=Graphic&c10=Blogpost&c11=News&c13=&c25=Datablog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FNews%2Fblog%2FDa tablog&c2=GUID:(none) WARC-Date: 2010-12-05T02:58:00Z WARC-Payload-Digest: sha1:3I42H3S6NNFQ2MSVX7XZKYAYSCX5QBYJ WARC-IP-Address: 66.235.138.18 WARC-Record-ID: <urn:uuid:7d5ce147-9b4b-46cb-8975-ee93b4d0dda8> Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response Content-Length: 740 HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT Server: Omniture DC/2.0.0 X-C: ms-4.3.1 Expires: Sat, 04 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0, proxy-revalidate, no-transform, private Pragma: no-cache ETag: "4CFAFFB8-0E4C-7443902F" Vary: * P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR NID PSA OUR IND COM NAV STA" Location: http://b.scorecardresearch.com/r?c2=6035250&d.c=gif&d.o=guardiangu- network&d.x=243551159&d.t=page&d.u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fdatablog%2F2010%2Fnov%2F08 %2Fprisoner-of-war-camps-uk xserver: www422 Content-Length: 0 Keep-Alive: timeout=15 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain
- 8. Extract meta-data and links (wat format) – Approx. 4.5 million files – 6.2TB on disk compressed – Housed at OII – Structured JSON – Different formats for arc/warcs
- 9. { "Container": { "Filename": "DOTUK-HISTORICAL-1996-2010-GROUP-AA-XAAAAA-20110428000000- 00000.arc.gz", "Offset": "88937", "Compressed": true, "Gzip-Metadata": { "Header-Length": "10", "Inflated-CRC": "-1223265901", "Inflated-Length": "26073", "Deflate-Length": "4463", "Footer-Length": "8" } }, "Envelope": { "ARC-Header-Length": "102", "ARC-Header-Metadata": { "Date": "20080509081524", "Target-URI": "http://www.ukhomeinteriors.co.uk/content/ext_corbels.php", "Content-Length": "25970", "Content-Type": "text/html", "IP-Address": "83.223.106.10" }, "Payload-Metadata": { "Actual-Content-Type": "application/http; msgtype=response", "Block-Digest": "sha1:MCCZNOKBJHTZ5MMMCUJGBPE25C2TVUWF", "HTTP-Response-Metadata": { "Headers-Length": "591", "HTML-Metadata": { "Head": { "Title": "Exterior Corbels",
- 10. Plain text lists Build own ad-hawk Hadoop cluster, fix incompatibilities, divide into smaller batches – Build plain text lists of pages and hyperlinks – Remove error page (e.g., 404 Not Found) – Remove pages not in .uk – Standardize dates (many formats) – Standardize hyperlinks (trailing /, etc.) – Fix/remove tons of invalid hyperlinks (whitespace, invalid characters, etc.) Load results into Apache Hive (2.5 TB)
- 13. Relative size of second-level-domains
- 14. Number of links within SLD per node
- 15. Cross-domain links (2010) Absolute Normalized to target size
- 16. Case of ac.uk Mapping the UK Webspace: Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web Hale et al., WebSci'14, available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2856 121 UK universities websites and links 1) League table ranking 2) Group affiliation 3) Geographical location
- 20. Gravity Law σ𝑖𝑗 = 𝑠𝑖𝑗 𝑠𝑖 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑠𝑗 𝑖𝑛 𝑠𝑖𝑗 = 𝑠𝑖 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑠𝑗 𝑖𝑛 𝑟0.28
- 21. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Primary aim: developing a methodological and theoretical framework within which to study over 15 years of UK domain data – with lessons for the future study of web archives more generally
- 22. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities The dataset: – Crawled from 1996 – 2013 – Approximately 65 TB, billions of words – Building interface to allow search by retrieval date, target domain of links, sentiment – Allow qualitative and quantitative analysis – and iteration between multiple research techniques
- 23. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities Key outputs: – Ten bursary projects using web archive data to investigate a broad range of topics, for example… • Armed services recruitment online • The accessibility of the web for disabled users • Online discussions of ‘Beat’ poetry – An edited book of empirical studies concerning the history of the UK web, featuring chapters on, for example… • Constitutional and institutional change in UK government • The BBC’s online presence • The ‘web of faith’ online
- 24. Next ● Studies underway at OII, BL, IHR ● Book and articles – Study overall growth of .uk – Case study of .gov.uk – Study of media and select committee visibility ● Releasing data open source