Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

As commonly seen on Facebook and Twitter, the social card is a type of surrogate that provides clues as to what is behind a URI. In this case, the URI is from Google and the social card makes it clear that the document behind this long URI is directions. As I described to the audience of Dodging the Memory Hole last year, surrogates provide the reader with some clue of what exists behind a URI . The social card is one type of surrogate. Above we see a comparison between a Google URI and a social card generated from that URI. Unless a reader understands the structure of all URIs at google.com , they will not know what the referenced content is about until they click on it. The social card, on the other hand, provides clues to the reader that the underlying URI provides directions from Old Dominion University to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Surrogates allow readers to pierce the veil of the URI's opaqueness. With  the death of Storify , I've been  examining alternati...

Many web services such as  archive.is ,  Archive-It ,  Internet Archive , and  UK Web Archive  have provided archived web pages or mementos  for us to use. Nowadays, the web archivists have shifted their focus from how to make a good archive to measuring how well the archive preserved the page. It raises a question about how to objectively measure the damage of a memento that can correctly emulate user (human) perception. Related to this,  Justin Brunelle  devised a prototype for measuring the impact of missing embedded resources (the damage) on a web page. Brunelle, in his IJDL paper (and the earlier JCDL version), describes that the quality of a memento depends on the availability of its resources. The straight percentage of missing resources in a memento is not always a good indicator of how "damaged" it is. For example, one page could be missing several small icons whose absence users never even notice, and a second pag...