1. Pre-Foundations of Digital Methods
2. When words are “keywords”: Query design and other digital methods
3. Lippmannian device: “Making an Issue Cloud”

Photo: 2010 Jöran Maaswinkel (@JeeeM) Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0

On Tuesday we celebrated the book launch of Frank Meeuwsen’s Bloghelden, a history of the Dutch blogosphere from 1995 to 2005, at SETUP in Utrecht. I was asked to give a presentation on a project Esther Weltevrede and I are working on: Mapping the Dutch blogosphere over time.

Photo by danischouten

In his article ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’ from 2003 author Frank Schaap distinguishes two types of bloggers in the Dutch blogosphere: the lifeloggers and the linkloggers.¹ These two types of blogs, the lifelogs and the linklogs, have very specific and different linking patterns. Anno 2010 we can distinguish a new type of blog: the platformlog.

The aim of this study is to map changing blogging practices within the Dutch blogosphere. This may be done by looking at changing linking practices and studying the linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere.

Method

• Create a startlist of URLs. In this casestudy we compiled a list from experts: Arie Altena, Gert-Jan Lasterie, Frank Meeuwsen's Bloghelden book, Merel Roze's article on the Dutch Blogosphere in Schrijven Voor Het Web, and Frank Schaap's article. In the future this list will be supplemented with the Webloglijst (an early semi-manual Technorati) and Nedstat top 1000 weblogs’ statistics.
• Create hyperlink networks over time with the Issuecrawler.

Preliminary findings

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Hyves and other social media platforms appear as important actors within the network. In this sample of May 2010 Twitter is the dominant platform in the Dutch blogosphere receiving 34484 links from the crawled population. In 2010 social media platforms receive the most links from the crawled population indicating their prominence on the web and in the blogosphere. Claim: We have moved from a bloggers A-list to a platform A-list consisting of a top three of: Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. The linking structure of the Dutch blogosphere anno 2010 is characterized by social media platforms.

Maps

Click on the maps to download a hi-res PDF file (around 800K).

Social media platforms in the Dutch blogosphere

Dutch Blogosphere on 18 May 2010

Further research

• Look up URLs in the Internet Archive and create a special collection by archiving them. Visualize hyperlink networks over time with Gephi.
• How do linking practices change and which clusters emerge? When do the social media platforms arrive?
• Diagnosing the current condition of the early Dutch blogosphere.

Slides in English & Dutch

1. Frank Schaap, ‘Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere’, Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs < http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/links_lives_logs.html> [

Under-explored Spaces by Digital Methods

Special attention will be paid to under-explored spaces and subspaces online. Explored spaces by digital methods include hyperlink networks, IP numbers, archived website collections and previous states of the Web, top-level and second-level domains, search engine returns, social bookmarks and related tags, the spheres, national Webs and filtered content, social networking profiles, wikipedia article edit histories and tweets related by hashtag. Of the under-explored spaces, there are the classic ones, as well as those which may resist current tools and methods. In the former category of course there have been portions of the Web thought to be unreachable by crawlers (the ‘dark web’), another relatively untouched by humans (the crawled-only web), a third not to be captured (the ‘ephemeral web’) and the fourth one that no longer exists, the dead web. (Placing the robots.txt exclusion on a website now flushes the site’s stored history in the Internet archive.) However, the focus in the Summer School is on spaces currently garnering attention for their democratic potential, such as the comment space as well as the overlay or annotated map space, and exploring their potential for social and cultural research.

Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School has a certificate program. It is a two-week intensive training and skill acquisition program which runs, every other weekday, 28 June to 9 July 2010. The certificate program is recommended for those researchers with limited exposure to digital methods to date.

Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010

The Digital Methods Summer School also has an advanced program. It is a three-week undertaking, meeting physically Mondays and Fridays, with an ongoing commitment, where researchers propose and carry out projects, from research question and query design to methodological operationalization, tool use and visual and written output, including narrative and presentation. Each week has a dedicated theme, and is facilitated by advanced Amsterdam-based Digital Methods researchers. Thematic projects may include explorations of the comment space, real-time results, activity in social media, comparative Web space temporalities (such as static, real-time, periodic and irregularly-paced), as well as the creation of Web collections for the purposes of historical research.

Applications

To apply for the Digital Methods Training Certificate Program, 28 June – 9 July 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods training would benefit your current work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Training Certificate Program.”

To apply for the Digital Methods Advanced Projects Program, 9 August – 27 August 2010, please send a one-page letter explaining how digital methods have benefited your work, and also enclose a CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Advanced Program.”

To apply for both programs, please write a letter explaining your overall affinity with digital methods work, and include your CV. Mark your application “DMI Summer Full Program.”

Selection of participants is based on the fit between candidate interests and available skills and expertise. Selection is also based on commitment to full attendance as well as your work in digital methods. Please be advised that we may contact you for additional information and request a conversation in person, by phone or by Skype (whichever is most suitable).

Please send applications to Esther Weltevrede, Digital Methods Initiative, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, info {at} digitalmethods.net. Informal queries should be sent to Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam, rogers {at} uva.nl.

Deadline for applications is 3 May 2010. Responses to be sent on 7 May 2010. Conversations in person, by phone or by Skype will be held on 10 and 11 May. Circulation of finalized participants’ list on 12 May.

Logistics

Participants must arrange their own travel and accommodation. There is no fee for participation in the Summer School. Space is limited.

The Digital Methods Initiative acknowledges the generous support of the Science Faculty, University of Amsterdam, and Platform Beta Techniek, http://www.platformbetatechniek.nl/.

Previous Digital Methods Summer Schools, 2007-2009

The Digital Methods Summer School is in its fourth year. The third Summer School in 2009 treated media attention formats, Wikipedia as space of controversy, repurposing Google for social research and methods for Internet archive research, including “conjuring a past state of the Web.” The second Summer School, which coincided with the 10-year jubilee of the Govcom.org foundation, was dedicated to the turn away from user studies, and also produced the video, commenting on Google’s 10-year anniversary, “Google and the politics of tabs.” The IP Browser, recently shown at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona, is also a product of the 2008 gatherings. The first Summer School, in 2007, sought to establish the study of natively digital objects, how they are handled by dominant web devices, and whether the “methods in the media” may be repurposed for social and cultural research.

Related project URLs

The Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, participates in the EU project facilitated by Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris, http://www.mappingcontroversies.net/.

DMI researchers also participate in the ATACD network, the EU project facilitated by Celia Lury, Goldsmiths, London, http://www.atacd.net/.

About

Reworking method for Internet research, the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a collaboration of the New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam. Its director is Richard Rogers, Chair, New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, and its coordinators are Esther Weltevrede and Sabine Niederer, PhD candidates in Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

On Wednesday evening we (the Digital Methods Initiative) arrived in Vierhouten, the Netherlands to attend Hacking at Random 2009. It is my first visit to the event which is held every four years. There are 3000 geeks, lectures, lightning talks, workshops, installations and a lot of pinball machines! The event was sold out before it started and the last tickets were sold on the black market for 900 euros!

The stereotype is true: The average HAR visitor is a 35 year old male into computer programming. But what the hack? It is wonderful here! The weather is absolutely great and we have built our own Digital Methods Inititiative village with a party tent with electricity and an ethernet connection. The campings are filled with people from all over Europe and we’ve met Canadians, Americans and people from all over the world.

The whole event is well organized and run by volunteers. We also signed up to help out by filling two shifts selling coins.

We spend the average day designing, downloading, tweeting and eating excellent vegetarian dishes made by Aan de Amstel catering. At night we walk around the event site which is beautifully decorated with lasers, disco balls and other lights. The site is filled with people hacking, soldering, programming, drinking beers or snoring like an unorganized orchestra ;)

Hacking at Random 2009 from silvertje on Vimeo.

Hacking at Random 2009 from silvertje on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for more posts, pictures and videos from HAR2009.

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!