Big Web data, small focus: An ethnosemiotic approach to culturally themed selective Web archiving. Saskia Huc-Hephe.
Big Data & Society. July 2015.
The fundamental purpose of a Web archive is to retain a version of the fragile and ephemeral digital material found on the Internet for posterity, thereby providing a lasting record of Web objects deemed to be of intellectual and cultural value to current and future generations. A web archive collects only material found on the
Internet, safeguarding it from future obsolescence as the internet changes. It is not
a record of data, nor a copy, but an
entity composed of digital material brought together in a more restricted environment.
The article talks about curating a smaller, thematically selected web
collection as part of a larger web archive, effectively an
archive within an archive. An example is looking at the French community in
London. The individual people may not see themselves as belonging to such a community, which questions the validity of constructing a ‘community’ web archive. So the archiving efforts are more creation than curation. One definition of digital curation is ‘maintaining,
and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use: in other
words, it is the active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life-cycle’. This definition may not fit with web archiving. The curator of a themed web collection is not necessarily
a specialist in archival cataloguing or curation, has deep insider
knowledge of the ‘field’ for which the collection has been created.
"The significance of the small-scale, micro-Web-archiving
approach foregrounded lies in its deployment as a strategy for overcoming the
‘data deluge’ inevitably triggered by non-selective, catch-all repositories."
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