What can history tell us?: towards different models of interaction with document histories (original) (raw)

Using page histories for improving browsing the web

2008

Currently, users generally do not have much temporal support when browsing Web pages. The Web is in fact a transitive collection where little effort is made for enabling access to historical content of pages. However, integrating documents with their histories should bring many benefits such as facilitated judgment of documents' trustworthiness or time travel. In this paper we present several interaction methods that users could have with page histories. We also demonstrate example systems designed for realizing these interaction types and discuss related issues.

Web History Tools and Revisitation Support: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Directions

Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction, 2007

Millions of web pages are visited, and revisited every day. On average, every second page loaded was already visited before by the same user-individual means for recurrence rates range between 20% and 72% (cf. p. 24). People revisit pages within a session or between parallel ones, they reuse web-based tools habitually, monitor specific content or resume interrupted sessions, and they want to re-find content after longer periods of time. Current history tools that support such revisits show unique and severe shortcomings. Often, revisits are cumbersome, more than necessary. This survey summarizes existing knowledge about revisitations on the web, and surveys the potential of graphic-based web history tools. A taxonomy of revisit-types distinguishes between short-, medium-, and long-term revisits, but also intra-and inter-session revisits. Assisted by a clear nomenclature this provides more clarity to the current discussion. The potential use of graphic-based tools is analyzed and discussed with respect to the found categories. The value of the current, mainly ix

Journey to the past: proposal of a framework for past web browser

2006

While the Internet community recognized early on the need to store and preserve past content of the Web for future use, the tools developed so far for retrieving information from Web archives are still difficult to use and far less efficient than those developed for the "live Web." We expect that future information retrieval systems will utilize both the "live" and "past Web" and have thus developed a general framework for a past Web browser. A browser built using this framework would be a client-side system that downloads, in real time, past page versions from Web archives for their customized presentation. It would use passive browsing, change detection and change animation to provide a smooth and satisfactory browsing experience. We propose a metaarchive approach for increasing the coverage of past Web pages and for providing a unified interface to the past Web. Finally, we introduce query-based and localized approaches for filtered browsing that enhance and speed up browsing and information retrieval from Web archives.

Memento: Time travel for the web

2009

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.

How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems

1997

We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (web) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analysed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a wellknown web browser.

Designing an integrated bookmark/history system for Web browsing

2000

ABSTRACT Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer attempt to make it easier for users to return to previously visited web pages. They offer three separate but important facilities: the back button, a bookmark system, and a history list. However, research indicates that users are not utilizing all of these systems effectively. In this paper, we present a single integrated history that unifies functionality similar to the back button, bookmarks and history lists.

Historical Infrastructures for Web Archiving

Historical infrastructures for Web archiving: Annotation of ephemeral collections for research Charles van den Heuvel and Meghan Dougherty The World Wide Web is becoming a source of information for researchers, who are more aware of the possibilities for collections of Internet content as resources. Some have begun creating archives of web content for social science and humanities research. However, there is a growing gulf between policies shared between global and national institutions creating web archives and the practices of researchers making use of the archives. Each set of stakeholders finds the others’ web archiving contributions less applicable to their own field. Institutions find the contributions of researchers to be too narrow to meet the needs of the institution’s audience, and researchers find the contributions of institutions to be too broad to meet the needs of their research methods. Resources are extended to advance both institutional and researcher tools, but the gulf between the two is persistent. Institutions generally produce web archives that are broad in scope but with limited access and enrichment tools. The design of common access interfaces, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, limit access points to archives to only URL and date. This narrow access limits the ways in which web archives can be valuable for exploring research questions in the humanities and social sciences. Individual scholars, in catering to their own disciplinary and methodological needs, produce web archives that are narrow in scope, and whose access and enrichment tools are personalized to work within the boundaries of the project for which the web archive was built. There is no way to explore a subset of an archive by topic, event, or idea. The current search paradigm in web archiving access tools is built primarily on retrieval, not discovery. We suggest that there is a need for extensible tools to enhance access to and enrichment of web archives to make them more readily reusable and so, more valuable for both institutions and researchers, and that annotation activities can serve as one potential guide for development of such tools to bridge the divide. The contextual knowledge production evolving from annotation not only adds value to web archives by providing one solution to the problem of limited resources for generating metadata in web archives; it also forms part of our collective memory and needs to be preserved together with the original content. In the 19th and 20th centuries documentalists, such as Paul Otlet (1868-1944) began exploring methods to order, access, and annotate ephemeral, dynamic material for research. Otlet developed a documentation system in which bibliographical material describing content transmitted by all sorts of media (radio, film, gramophone and television) was stored together with various forms of annotations, ranging from updates to expressions of opinion. It imagined researchers working together on a global level to create and to enrich collective memory. We claim that these pre-web annotation initiatives are also of interest for future strategies to access and preserve more dynamic and ephemeral forms of digital cultural heritage, such as web archiving.

Contextual web history: using visual and contextual cues to improve web browser history

2009

Abstract While most modern web browsers offer history functionality, few people use it to revisit previously viewed web pages. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Contextual Web History (CWH), a novel browser history implementation which improves the visibility of the history feature and helps people find previously visited web pages. We present the results of a formative user study to understand what factors helped people in finding past web pages.