2014 not found: a cross-platform approach to retrospective web archiving (original) (raw)

While web archiving techniques capture snapshots of websites inreal time, this article introduces an approach for building specialcollections for web archiving in retrospect. Retrospective webarchiving (RWA) aims to fill-in gaps in existing archives, as well asto expand the boundaries of web archiving from the open webto cross-platform curation, and from national to international per-spectives. The proposed approach is tested on a case study ofthe 2014 War in Gaza. The retrospective collection contains118,508 unique URIs and relevant metadata, carbon-dated to theperiod of the military operation, in 46 languages and 5692domain suffixes, collected from Wikipedia, Google, Twitter andYouTube. Findings suggest that four years after the war, 50% ofthe URIs were still available on the live web, but only 38% ofthem have already been archived elsewhere. Although URL shar-ing on social media was found the most relevant for retrospectivecuration, the platformisation of the web, along with the popular-ity of URL shortening services, severely impacts their archivalcoverage. The article suggests taking into account platformdynamics and cultural differences in link sharing practices, whenthinking about future curation policies for both real timeand RWA.