2026-07-13: WSDL Cartoon Book: Issue 1: Trip to Norway and How It Changed the Way I Think About Web Archives and Digital Libraries

 

Sometimes, all it takes is a trip to Norway to confirm that everything is connected.

From June 2 to June 11, I traveled with my faculty advisors from Storymodelers to Kristiansand, Norway, to participate in a workshop on the use of modeling as a method for teaching and learning. This workshop was part of an ongoing project at the University of Agder titled "Modeling for Histories", which is currently in the early stages of testing and has not yet been publicly disseminated. The project is led by Dr. Apostolos Spanos (University of Agder) in collaboration with Dr. Alexandra Lazareva (University of Agder), Dr. Jose J. Padilla (Old Dominion University) and Dr. Erika Frydenlund (Old Dominion University). The goal is to explore how model thinking can support history education by helping students move beyond traditional linear narratives and develop a deeper understanding of complex relationships, actors, and processes that shape historical events.

This blog is a summary of the experience, insights, and thoughts regarding the relationship between modeling and web archives that emerged along the way. I created it as a cartoon book as a way to convey ideas differently while reflecting the work I am doing for my dissertation, where I am exploring the archivability and contextualization of editorial cartoons.

Understanding Modeling and Its Value Across Disciplines

Once in Norway, we sat down together to plan the workshop. We started discussing what modeling is and how it can support teaching and learning in history. This conversation helped reconcile ideas and perspectives, as well as reflect on the value of modeling across disciplines.

From Coffee to Complexity: The Role of Modeling in History Education

We called the workshop From Coffee to Complexity. For details, see the Storymodelers blog. The workshop explored a simple question: What must happen for a cup of coffee to appear in your kitchen tomorrow morning? What began with coffee, water, electricity, and a coffee machine quickly expanded into a much larger system where participants brought up concepts such as transportation, coffee evolution, labor, infrastructure, governance, climate change, migration, colonialism, labor exploitation, and globalization. Participants connected with different parts of the system and the modeling process, contributing perspectives based on their own expertise and experiences.

What I Observed in the Workshop

What caught my attention was how important the word data was throughout the discussion: what information is available, how it should be structured, and what evidence is needed to better understand a system. Historians, in particular, seemed interested in cultural elements, such as the people, events, and connections that helped explain how that cup of coffee ended up on the table. In other words, the conversation throughout the modeling process was not really about coffee; it was about understanding the stories and processes behind it through data that needs to be collected, preserved, and interpreted over time. Sounds familiar? That was what came to mind while listening. Much like historians work with historical sources, and modeling becomes a way of thinking and structuring data to better make sense of it, researchers working with web archives and digital libraries often seek to collect, preserve, and understand information.

A Connection to Web Archives and Digital Libraries

A web archive or a digital library is much more than a collection of webpages or files, just as the coffee exercise was much more than a cup of coffee. Every archived resource is connected to people, organizations, events, technologies, and broader social contexts. Then, it is important to remember that the challenge is not preservation alone—it is understanding. As web archives and digital collections continue to grow, researchers need ways to organize and structure information, identify relationships, and make sense of increasingly complex datasets. I contend that, in many ways, web archives and digital libraries can be viewed as rich representations of complex systems. Modeling provides a way to represent those systems, helping researchers move beyond individual documents to better understand how information, people, and events connect over time.

WSDL Examples of Model Thinking

Several researchers from WSDL have already applied ideas that closely align with model thinking, even if they are not explicitly described as modeling processes. For example, Dr. Alexander Nwala and collaborators developed StoryGraph, a project that helps researchers understand how news stories evolve and spread across the web. StoryGraph analyzes relationships among articles from different news outlets and groups together those discussing the same topic or event. The result is a graph-based model of the news ecosystem, where articles and news sources are represented as interconnected entities. What I find particularly interesting about StoryGraph is that it highlights two important aspects of model thinking. First, it provides a way to organize large amounts of information into a structure that is easier to understand and explore. Second, the model allows researchers to move beyond individual articles and simple narratives by making relationships visible. By taking this as a starting point, researchers can go beyond the simple model and keep the same line of model thinking to consider additional actors, concepts, and relationships that could be incorporated into the model, generating new questions, hypotheses, and directions for future research.

Another example is Raintale, a storytelling framework developed by Dr. Shawn M. Jones and collaborators, which publishes social media stories from groups of archived web pages (mementos). Raintale organizes archived snapshots into coherent narratives that can be explored and shared. In many ways, this process resembles model building. Creating a meaningful story requires understanding the system behind the collection, including the events, actors, relationships, and contexts that connect individual archived resources. The resulting outcome becomes a simplified representation of a much larger and more complex collection, helping users better understand the context and significance of an event. Similar to the lesson from the coffee workshop, Raintale demonstrates that understanding does not necessarily come from collecting more information, but from organizing information in ways that make relationships visible, meaningful, and easier to communicate.

Final  Thoughts

Looking back, what changed during my trip to Norway was not my understanding of what web archives and digital libraries are, but how I think about approaching them as a researcher. The experience reinforced the idea that before we analyze data, build tools, or draw conclusions, we first need to understand the systems behind the information we collect. My invitation to the research community is to consider adopting a modeling mindset when approaching research problems and methodologies. The process of creating a representation of a system—identifying actors, concepts, processes, and relationships—can help us think more critically about the questions we ask and the data we choose to analyze. For me, that was the most valuable lesson from Norway. Modeling is not only a technique; it is a way of thinking. Whether we are studying history, exploring web archives, building digital libraries, or developing new computational tools, taking the time to represent and understand a system before acting on it can take us to get new perspectives, new questions, and new opportunities for discovery.

Finally, of course, the trip was not all about research. I got to experience Norway for the first time, enjoy the incredible landscapes, walk around Kristiansand, and even pet a moose. Below are some pics.

Me and my two faculty advisors from Storymodelers at the University of Agder

Enjoying the landscape in Arendal, Norway

Feeding and petting a moose