See: http://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/05/07/mit8-talk-exploring-the-boundaries-of-a-website-using-the-internet-archive-to-study-historical-web-ecologies/

1. Using the Internet Archive to study
historical web ecologies
Anne Helmond
University of Amsterdam
MiT8: public media, private media. May 3-5, 2013 at MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Exploring the boundaries of a website
1

2. Within the web as platform, where does a website
begin and end?
The website in 1.0, the website in 2.0, the website
and social media platforms.
the boundaries of a website
2

3. the problem with archived websites:
one archives the website over the references
contained therein (hyperlinks), the systems that
delivered them (engines), the ecology in which they
may or may not thrive (the sphere) and the pages or
accounts contained therein that keep the user
actively grooming his or her online profile and status
(the platform). (Rogers 2013)
Rogers, Richard. 2013. Digital Methods. Cambridge: MIT Press. See also: Weltevrede 2009, Brügger 2012.
natively digital non-archived objects
3

4. the boundaries of a website
4

5. the boundaries of a website
5

6. the boundaries of a website
6

7. the boundaries of a website
7

8. the boundaries of a website
8

9. the boundaries of a website
9

10. “The term “ecology” is used here because it is one of
the most expressive language currently has to
indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of
processes and objects, beings and things, patterns
and matter.” (Fuller 2005: 2)
“I want to understand the ecology in computational
ecology here as a broad concept related to the
environmental habitus of both human and
nonhuman actors.” (Berry 2012)
website ecology
10

11. website ecology
11

12. case study: tracing the trackers
12

13. traces of trackers in the source code
13

14. method
1. Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Ripper
2. Run all IA URLs per year into Tracker Tracker tool
3. Analyze and visualize results
All tools from the Digital Methods Initiative can be found at: http://tools.digitalmethods.net/
14

15. 1. get all links
15

16. 2. check archived websites for trackers
16

17. RESULTS
Unique number of trackers per year on the New York Times frontpage.
Green: ad, orange: tracker, blue: analytics, pink: widget. Categorization provided by Ghostery.
17

18. REsULTS
18

19. further research
Create networks of historical web ecologies of trackers over time
Gerlitz & Helmond 2013
19

20. conclusion
Anne Helmond: a.helmond@uva.nl
University of Amsterdam
20

21. Berry, David M. 2012. “Life in Code and So!ware.” Living Books About Life. September 23. http://
www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Life_in_Code_and_So!ware/Introduction.
Brügger, Niels. 2012. “Web Historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and Perspectives.” New Media & Society
(November 21). doi:10.1177/1461444812462852. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/
2012/11/19/1461444812462852.
Fuller, Matthew. 2005. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies In Art And Technoculture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gerlitz, Carolin, and Anne Helmond. 2013. “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-intensive Web.” New Media
& Society (February 4). doi:10.1177/1461444812472322. http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/
2013/02/03/1461444812472322.
Langlois, Ganaele, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin. 2009. “Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds:
Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis” (14). http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-095-mapping-commercial-
web-2-0-worlds-towards-a-new-critical-ontogenesis/.
Rogers, Richard. 2013. Digital Methods. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Song, Felicia Wu. “Theorizing Web 2.0.” Information, Communication and Society 13, no. 2 (2010): 249–275. doi:
10.1080/13691180902914610.
Weltevrede, Esther. 2009. “Thinking Nationally with the Web: A Medium-specific Approach to the National Turn in Web
Archiving.” Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Bibliography
21