Capturing online cultures and
storytelling as a method1
annet dekker capturing online cultures and storytelling as a method
Introduction
Capturing the Web
*uc
annet dekker
Much progress has been made in developing tools, models, strategies and other
methods to preserve or document websites2, but successful Web preservation also
requires comprehending how the dynamic environment in which components
thrive can be captured. To enable a future reconstruction of aesthetics,
accountability or heritage, it is crucial to understand the context in which these
websites functioned. Within the short span of a mere twenty years people have
become accustomed to browsing the Web, finding all kinds of information by simply
clicking from link to link. While information steams by, the context of how the
information surfaces, what strata one search or the click on one link can cause is
forgotten immediately since the new is there within milliseconds. The dynamics of
the Web have become invisible to many of its users and the way data comes into
being is forgotten. Focusing on the preservation of art on the Web, in what follows
I will emphasize the importance of capturing the broader environment of platforms
and social interactions in which many of these artworks thrive. Next to highlighting
some of the difficulties in preserving these contexts, I explore storytelling as a
method to develop and enrich a historic understanding of online cultures.
Several attempts have been made over the past two decades to document websites.
One of the best known is the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The mission of
the non-profit organization Internet Archive, founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle,
is to provide free access to all kinds of digitized and digital materials, including
websites, software, games, music, moving images and books.3 On 24 October 2001
the organization launched the Wayback Machine, a free service allowing people to
access and use archived versions of past Web pages, because as they argue:
"Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and
heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism
to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and
more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those
artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars."4
Looking more closely at the Wayback Machine shows they only capture time-
stamped snapshots of websites. As such, it foregrounds 'single-site histories', which
means that single pages in a website can be studied over time.5 In some cases, this
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works without any problems, as, for example, Jill Lepore, reporter for The New
Yorker, describes in her article on how to archive the Internet: 'The Cobweb. Can the
Internet be Archived'. She references the MH17 Ukraine plane crash in June 2014 to
explain the usefulness of the Internet Archive. A mere two weeks before the incident,
a curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford,
had submitted to the Internet Archive, a list of Ukrainian and Russian websites and
blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive's Ukraine Conflict collection.
They did this and managed to intercept and record a screenshot of a VKontakte
(a social network) post by Strelkov (the field commander in Slaviansk) claiming
that a plane had been shut down. The original post was removed within two and
a half hours after the 'incident', but evidence of the original claim can still be traced
in the Wayback Machine.6
17.07.2014 JlyraHCK.
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J1HP) 17.07.2014
|https://vk.com/strelkov_info 11 Co J^N
998 captures
ljun 2014 - 6 Nov 2018 2013
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2015 LJJftffll
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Figure 1. Screencapture VKontakte, Wayback Machine7
1 This article builds on earlier research on the preservation of net art, and some parts were previously
published in Annet Dekker, 'Between Light and Dark Archiving', in: Media Art Histories Leonardo (2018)
(forthcoming).
2 For example Niels Brügger 'The Archived Website and Website Philology: A New Type of Historical
Document?', in: Nordicom Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008) Niels Brügger 'Website History and the Website as
an Object of Study', in: New Media Society, Vol. 11, No. 1-2 (2009) pp. 115-132 Richard Rogers Digital
Methods (Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press, 2013).
3 For more information see, for example, https://www.uibk.ac.at/voeb/texte/kahle.html, last accessed
13/10/2018
4 https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#21, last accessed 13/10/2018.
5 Rogers Digital Methods, p. 66.
6 Jill Lepore, 'The Cobweb. Can the Internet be Archived?', in: The New Yorker (2015, 26 January).
7 See also https://web.archive.org/web/20140717161058/https://vk.com/strelkov_info
scroll down to the right time 17/07/2014 17:50 last accessed 13/10/2018.
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