Sorting URLs Out: Seeing the Web through Infrastructural Inversion of Archival Crawling

Maemura, Emily

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125947 Copy

Description

Title

Sorting URLs Out: Seeing the Web through Infrastructural Inversion of Archival Crawling

Author(s)

Maemura, Emily

Issue Date

2023

Keyword(s)

• web archives
• web crawlers
• crawler traps
• infrastructure studies
• infrastructural inversion
• socio-technical systems

Date of Ingest

2025-03-17T11:47:48-05:00

Abstract

Web archives collections have become important sources for Internet scholars by documenting the past versions of web resources. Understanding how these collections are created and curated is of increasing concern and recent web archives scholarship has studied how the artifacts stored in archives represent specific curatorial choices and collecting practices. This paper takes a novel approach in studying web archiving practice, by focusing on the challenges encountered in archival web crawling and what they reveal about the web itself. Inspired by foundational work in infrastructure studies, infrastructural inversion is applied to study how crawler interactions surface otherwise invisible, background or taken-for-granted aspects of the web. This framework is applied to study three examples selected from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork observations of web archiving practices at the Danish Royal Library, with findings demonstrating how the challenges of archival crawling illuminate the web’s varied actors, as well as their changing relationships, power differentials and politics. Ultimately, analysis through infrastructural inversion reveals how collection via crawling positions archives as active participants in web infrastructure, both shaping and shaped by the needs and motivations of other web actors.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

article

Language

eng

DOI

10.1080/24701475.2023.2258697

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canada Graduate Scholarship 767-2015-2217 and Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement.

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