Figure 1: Virtual Machine with Gephi running
I was invited to speak to the Danish NetLab about historians and web archives. The presentation includes:
- why I think historians need to use web archives;
- why existing acccess methods (i.e. Wayback Machine or Archive-It search) are insufficient;
- how a combination of Warcbase and Shine can help you unlock your collections!
Slidedeck has been uploaded as a PDF, available here. Download it here
I was also invited to speak, later in the day, at the Centre for Internet Studies on my work with the GeoCities torrent. The page about my talk is available here.
Some links follow in the sections below.
The Warcbase Wiki is available here
The Gephi: Converting Site Link Structure is available here
And sample data provided in this repo: output from Site Link Structure is part-r-00000; output from pig2gdf.py can be found in political-links.csv.
I will show a brief example with Gephi. If you have trouble using Gephi, see my section on troubleshooting below.
WebArchives.ca: a search interface for Archive-It's collection of Canadian Political Parties and Interest Groups.
Figure 2: Shine in Action
WebArchives.ca is an implementation of the UK Web Archive's Shine Interface – an amazing front end that I'll be talking about in the lecture.
It received some media attention in Canada, showing an appetite for this sort of material.
Gephi used to be quite difficult to get up and running, but the recent release of Gephi 0.9 has changed this dramatically. It should work out of the box.
I am always happy to chat. My personal website is at ianmilligan.ca or you can [e-mail me](mailto:i2millig@uwaterloo.ca].