Analyzing Web Archives Through Topic and Event Focused Sub-collections

TL;DR

This paper proposes a methodology for extracting and analyzing topic and event-focused sub-collections from large web archives to facilitate societal and historical research.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for creating focused sub-collections from web archives, addressing challenges posed by their size and temporal nature.

Findings

Framework for sub-collection creation

Discussion of opportunities and challenges

Enhanced study of societal developments

Abstract

Web archives capture the history of the Web and are therefore an important source to study how societal developments have been reflected on the Web. However, the large size of Web archives and their temporal nature pose many challenges to researchers interested in working with these collections. In this work, we describe the challenges of working with Web archives and propose the research methodology of extracting and studying sub-collections of the archive focused on specific topics and events. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of this approach and suggest a framework for creating sub-collections.