This perspective on archives is placed within Weltevrede’s research into National Webs. To think nationally with the web might seem counterintuitively at first because dominant ideas of the web are so global. This originates from the 90s idea of  Cyberspace which is a universal space with ideas of disembodiment and identity play. Crucially, cyberspace is a place that is disembedded from reality. After 2000 cyberspace was confronted with what Weltevrede calls “the national turn.”

This may be seen in a number of places, probably most familiar is Google.com redirects you to the location you are at, for example Google.nl and you get a totally different result page. Another example is “This video is not available in your country” intellectual property is really dominant in the nationalization of web content. You might also think in the terms of language. English used to be the dominant universal language, there is a lot of clustering happening on the web based on a shared language.

To move to the web archive, the most exhaustive project in the field is the Internet Archive which originates from the cyberspace period (1996.) This can also be seen in how the archive was set up. First of all, the scope of the collection is the “whole” internet which is a very broad collection aim. Secondly, when you look at the interface of the archive, the Wayback Machine, what you immediately notice is that you query it by URL and browse from that point on. It is characterized by browsing instead the current dominant form: searching. The Internet Archive therefor privileges single site histories instead of researching its context.

The Internet Archive emerged from the web company Alexa and Alexa provides all the crawls and donates it to the archive. This means that the selection of sites is based on traffic data. If you have the Alexa toolbar installed every page you visit will be included in the archive. It is a very smart way to start thinking about which pages should be included in the archive. After the Internet Archive in 1996 a number of initiatives emerged with a national focus. The general thought behind that was that national web archives can best serve local wishes and demands and serve the community (researchers, general public) best.

As an example we will look at a Dutch web archive maintained by the Royal Library of the Netherlands, the KB. Before we go into the actual project, let’s get a size of the Dutch web. The .nl domain is the fourth largest country domain with 3.2 million sites, an enormous amount.

How to demarcate the national web

1. .nl is the 4th largest country domain
2. A second way to look at the national web (.nl is not the whole Dutch web you could argue) we can look at all the domains registered by the Dutch (sidn.nl 2008)
3. What do we Dutch people find relevant sites? We can look at the most visited websites as listed by Alexa. We find these sites important through the number of visits.

These are three ways to think of how to define the national web by web means. The definition of the national aspect as used by the Royal Library is. They created a new definition of what is Dutch content.

• A: Website in Dutch, registered in the Netherlands
• B: Website in another language, registered in the Netherlands
• C: Website in Dutch, registered in another country
• D: Website in another language, registered in another country, topic aimed at the Netherlands.

All of these options seem technically feasible except for the last one. We cannot technically or automatically define content that is aimed at the Netherlands. It makes it highly unlikely that this Dutch web can be archived. What the Royal Library has done, is leave this definition and manually select sites. They started with 100 sites, it became 400 and now just over a 1000. They archive those sites really well.

As an internet researcher Weltevrede is particularly interested in the dynamics of websites. The contribution she would like to put forward is how else can we approach the object of collection, the Dutch web?

If you start web archiving the most easy and effective method is to follow the possibilities of the medium. You can automate a lot of things and besides that you can also focus on the context and prominence of the website in a particular period. The first point calls attention to the challenge to develop methods that follow the medium to automate the collection process. You could
schedule Google.nl for the query “.nl” because Google takes into account what is relevant, links to a website. These are not only considered relevant by Google but by a large group of people. Hyperlink structures are human acts of association, links die and emerge, what would that information provide us about the context and its network? If you would schedule it over time you could see the relevance of a particular source in a particular period. It would provide context for sources or websites, the born digital.

The final questions are:

• What would the national Web archive look like when the focus is on capturing hyperlinks, search engine results, and other digital objects?
• What aspects besides the digital document are relevant to save and why?
• Can we learn from how born digital devices (e.g. search engines, platforms and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and if so, how can such uses be repurposed for Web archiving>

Final personal note: The day after this presentation (this morning) my friend and colleague Esther Weltevrede graduated Cum Laude from the University of Amsterdam on her research on Archiving Web Dynamics. She will continue her research on National Webs as a PhD candidate with the Digital Methods Initiative. Congratulations Esther!

Monday, 11 August 2008, 1 – 5 pm
Location: Nina van Leer Zaal, Allard Pierson Museum, Oude Turfmarkt 129 (“Bijzondere Collecties” Entrance), Amsterdam.
Free entry, followed by drinks, 5 – 6.30pm

Digital Methods Summer Program Substance

Networked Content: Turning Away From the User
The Amsterdam Digital Summer program re-introduces the turn away from the user as content-organizing agent on the Web. Instead, it puts forward a device-centric approach to the study of what may be termed networked content. As valuable as the importation of fan studies has been in showing how a participatory culture gives rise to collective intelligence, it neglects what may be termed algorithmic consequences, that is, the manner in which content is delivered by devices in the first instance. The turn away from the user is at once a methodological as well as techno-epistemological program. Instead of placing video cameras over the users’ shoulders or affixing eye trackers, for example, a Web device diagnostics is preferred. How are the scanners, crawlers, scrapers and all other manner of content capturing devices changing the way Web effects are analysed? In engine critiques, the question remains which content is  served, when and where? In sphere critiques (websphere, blogosphere, newssphere, tagosphere), similarly the question concerns the distance of certain content from the surface, and how it may make itself known or hidden. For the new spaces, e.g., syndication and other feed arenas, content spread and coverage are under-interrogated.

Summer Talks I: Software Studies

Warren Sack
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
From the start, computer science has been concerned with automation, the means to replace people with machinery, in other words, to move people “out of the loop.” This is evident even in the founding, theoretical document of the field, where A.M. Turing (1936) states that his focus is on “automatic machines” which can run without intervention by an external, human operator. But, as computers and networks moved out of the lab and into homes, businesses and social spaces, software and hardware designers turned to social science – psychology, sociology and now, increasingly cultural anthropology – to understand the interface between people and machines and to rethink computers as a medium of communication between people. In its initial move to articulate a new field of study, computer science focused on machinery to the exclusion of people and has, subsequently, had to supplement its focus with ideas from social sciences to engage individuals, society, and most recently culture. Lucy Suchman’s (1987, 2007) pioneering work at Xerox PARC fundamentally changed computer science (especially artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction) to the extent that now most large, industry research labs (e.g., IBM, Intel, etc.) include cultural anthropologists. Bruno Latour and other Actor-Network Theorists have argued that social science has, unfortunately, tried to limit its scope to humans and exclude technology from its descriptions. In many ways, this is the converse of computer science’s opening move to leave people “out of the loop” in order to focus exclusively on technology. ANT opens social theory to technology both in its analysis and its vocabulary. Especially in newer manifestations, ANT redeploys the vocabularies of computer science to interrogate sociotechnical couplings (cf., Latour’s (2005a) usage of “object-oriented programming” and his extended analogy between web browser “plug-in” software and the circulation of subjectivity (Latour, 2005b)). So, “translation” (a la Callon and Latour) is happening in both directions: from computer science to science studies and back. This double translation constitutes a locus of activity in which computer science is executed as science studies and vice versa. The software of Richard Rogers, Andrei Mogoutov, and others in science studies demonstrates one aspect of this activity and the software of Phil Agre, Paul Dourish and others in computer science demonstrates another. Following new media theorists, I call this area of activity “software studies.” “Software studies” is a phrase coined by Lev Manovich in his book, The Language of New Media, and is the title of a recent collection edited by Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon. In this paper, I propose a definition of this emerging field of inquiry, software studies, and demonstrate some possibilities by using software I have written with colleagues and students over the past decade to summarize and visualize debates and discussions that take place in Open Source Software development efforts and in newsgroups and blogs devoted to politics and culture.

Summer Talks II: Alternative Algorithms (On Method)

Alexander Galloway
New York University, USA

It happens from time to time that a certain amount of reflection becomes necessary, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but as to the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology, which today has a distinctly liberal profile. With method, it is often more a question of suitability than existential correctness, often more a question of personal style than universal context. Hence methodological discussions these days often devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others–is it race, or is it class, or is it the logos, or the archive, or the gaze, or desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself–elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)? In this paper I examine what sorts of methodological approaches make sense today, making the case that the proper methodological position for those working critically within techno-culture is the creation of alternative algorithms.

Summer Talks III: Code Politics: Networking through Traffic and Tags

Greg Elmer
Ryerson University-Infoscape Research Lab, Canada

This presentation provides an overview of the theory, tools, and methods developed as part of the three year SSHRC funded Code politics project housed at the Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University, Toronto. The presentation will review the scrapers, analytical tools, data sets and visualizations that were developed from three case studies: 1) a blog analysis tool underdevelopment for the forthcoming Canadian federal election, 2) a YouTube study of networked/embedded videos during the Australian federal election and 3) a study of political issues circulating on Facebook groups during the Ontario provincial election in 2007. The presentation concludes with a discussion of cross platform, networked forms of analysis that highlight both users and researchers abilities to map and perform politics in the webosphere.

Summer Talks IV: The promised Cyberland: Does the state of Palestine already exist on the Web?

Anat Ben-David
Science, Technology and Society Program, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Whilst the current status of Palestine is that of a “national authority”, “(occupied) territories”, but not a state, one can say that the state of Palestine already exists on the Web since March 2003, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) delegated the dot.ps country code Top Level Domain, after the two-letter suffix was officially included in the U.N. list for recognized countries and territories (ISO3166-1). The official representation of Palestine on the Web was seen by many as entailing a great and unprecedented potential for creating a “promised cyberland”, an idealized and imagined cyberspace which will be used as a model for the anticipated state on the ground. In a complex geographic reality of unconnected Palestinian territories, and restraints put on Palestinians from physically contacting each other caused by derivatives of the Israeli occupation and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict such as the physical separation between Gaza and the West Bank, the Separation Wall, curfews and checkpoints, the Palestinian Web takes the discussion of the “imagined” in cyberspace beyond imagined communities and identities, to imagined places and geographies. Facilitated by ICTs, the Palestinian cyberstate bypasses the geographic reality on the ground and provides both continuously demarcated space and communication means for advancing public debate, polity, and establishment of the kind of statehood the anticipated Palestinian state wishes to realize on the ground. From a Web-studies and information politics perspectives, the .ps top level domain forms an unprecedented opportunity for studying relationships between the Web and the ground. Which is mirroring which? Which is anticipating which? Do they behave differently? This paper will describe an ongoing research project of the Palestinian Web as representing and anticipating Palestinian statehood, performed by Govcom.org in collaboration with the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme. The various analyses examined different aspects of Palestinian statehood on the Web, touching on the physical vs. virtual location of Palestinian Websites, Palestinian politics, academia, civil society, etc. In an attempt to demarcate and characterize the Palestinian Web, we often asked what kind of project has the .ps Web become: who is coming to use the .ps domain?  If not demarcated by the .ps top level domain, where can the Palestinian Web be found, and how can it be defined?  After providing some answers to these questions, this paper concludes by discussing the unique contribution of Web studies and non-biased, automated internet-based tools in mapping politically sensitive issues such as the Palestinian case in particular, and asymmetric conflicts in general.

Acknowledgments
Digital Methods Summer acknowledges the generous support of the Mondriaan Foundation’s Interregeling Fund. The Digital Methods Initiative is coordinated by Sabine Niederer and Esther Weltevrede, PhD candidates, Media & Culture, University of Amsterdam. You can mail us at digitalmethods.net

elfriendo.com – “Taking the work out of social networking”

elfriendo is a new MySpace related service, founded on 30 January 2008, on the occasion of the International Delete Your MySpace Account Day, as a remedy.

These days one hardly has time to fill in one set of fields before another update request comes in. elfriendo reduces the number of form-filling steps to a bare minimum, without sacrificing quality or depth. People used to neglect their profiles, leaving them stale and deficient. elfriendo offers fresh sets of interests and an active look for your profile.

elfriendo’s business is profilization – professionalizing, optimizing and automating your profile on MySpace, the world’s largest social networking site. elfriendo is a service that keeps your profile active fresh.

√ You can have a profile generated for you on the basis of just a few interests.

√ You can create a profile on the basis of another profile, and that person’s group of friends.

√ You can tweak your profile by comparing it to another profile’s network, raising or lowering your compatibility.

elfriendo is a Web 2.0 compliant European start-up company, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Yes! Take me there

What is elfriendo?
elfriendo is a MySpace related service. It’s designed for people who have no time to fill in a profile, or would like to save time blending in with other fans of a certain interest. You can use elfriendo to measure compatibility of profiles and interests, to make a profile based on your interests, or to have a profile makeover when you feel your profile is no longer properly representing you. The outcomes are suggested fields, ready for you to tweak and customize.

more FAQ

Our findings are that the RFID imagery is very dry as as associations to the biological are limited (for example human tagging, animal chip implants, etc.) Associations with machines and machinic diagrams predominate as only eight out of the 100 results are wet. I visualized these findings in the following graphics:

click images to enlarge

More details on the project, the research method and the findings can be found on the Digital Methods Initiative wiki.

Katherine Albrecht disabled Michael’s Albert Heijn Bonus card by signing it.

Timo Arnall gave an interesting talk about increasing the visibility of RFID.

On Saturday we gave a workshop with the Digital Methods Initiative where I worked on visualizing how “wet” the RFID imagery is according to Google. Of course I also made some tag clouds for other DMI projects.

The evening ended with Nabaz’mob, an opera for 100 smart rabbits.

All my Recalling RFID photos on Flickr.