During Karen’s 10 Minutes of Fame presentation, she expressed the need for copying down website/pages because they may become inactive or disappear. The Wayback Machine popped into my mind as a solution to that. The Wayback Machine was introduced to me by a classmate when one of our assigned readings was a dead link.
Background Information
The Way Back Machine is a free service provided by a non-profit organization call the Internet Archive, whose main purpose is to build an “internet library”, which for them is collecting and archiving everything on the internet. Their rationale for such archive is to preserve society’s digital cultural artifacts for educational and historical uses, and boast collaborations with the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution. Whether the information is truly used for educational mean is up for discussion, especially with the discovery of the NSA tracking personal communications on American based websites (The Internet Archive is based in San Francisco).
How It Works
The Wayback Machine is able to display websites and pages snapshots from a static point in time. Using crawlers, which are programs that spread through the internet jumping from website to website via links and pages, the Wayback Machine records each website it passes through (This is the same process that search engines collect information on websites to be used in their searches). To use the machine, you input a website in the search box, and if the Wayback Machine has it in its records, the results will show a calendar of the various dates and times the website was crawled and hence archived. At the top, it shows the number of times the website has been crawled in a bar graph form from 1996 (the start of the internet) to now; as well as, the date of the first archive entry. By clicking on the coloured circles on the calendar the user may visit different historical versions of the same website at each time it was crawled by the machine. Changing archive years, is done by moving the mouse over to the bar graph at the top of the page and clicking the number for the corresponding year.
An example of the Wayback Machine’s archive of Weebly.
Things to Consider
- The Wayback Machine does not have archives for every website on the internet. It’s just not possible to have every single one.
- The Wayback Machine’s terms of service does not allow for the copying of websites in their archives, because of copyright issues. It is meant as a reference for viewing.
- A person may request that their OWN website be removed from their collection.
Besides having practical uses for teachers re-visiting dead links, the Wayback Machine can be used in the library or classroom to teach internet safety, digital citizenship and online presence. The teacher can show that whatever they put on the internet can be found and can never be ‘erased’.
When I was in art school my photography professor predicted that there was going to be a black hole of visual history that started with the advent of photography. Up to that point, visual history was recorded in paintings, sculpture and drawings, some of which lasted millennia (such as cave paintings). With the advent of photography, visual history was recorded using chemical processes on paper. But these documents do not last, and many photographic archives are disappearing because the materials are degrading. With digital documentary, there is a chance that we will be able to access our visual history in the far future, but only if we keep our digital documents current with the technologies (remember floppy disks?). I think the Wayback Machine is actually profoundly important, as it is capturing the evolution of our human history as it is displayed as files on the Internet.