Visualizing Webpage Changes Over Time

TL;DR

TMVis is a web service that visualizes webpage changes over time using various interactive and static visualizations, aiding scholars and the public in exploring web archives' temporal evolution.

Contribution

It introduces TMVis, a novel web tool offering multiple visualization methods for webpage change history, integrating past research on webpage summarization and selection.

Findings

Four visualization types: image grid, slider, timeline, GIF.

Embed codes for visualizations facilitate integration into other webpages.

Supports exploration of web archive evolution for diverse users.

Abstract

We report on the development of TMVis, a web service to provide visualizations of how individual webpages have changed over time. We leverage past research on summarizing collections of webpages with thumbnail-sized screenshots and on choosing a small number of representative past archived webpages from a large collection. We offer four visualizations: image grid, image slider, timeline, and animated GIF. Embed codes for the image grid and image slider can be produced to include these on separate webpages. The animated GIF can be downloaded as an image file for the same purpose. This tool can be used to allow scholars from various disciplines, as well as the general public, to explore the temporal nature of web archives. We hope that these visualizations will just be the beginning and will provide a starting point for others to expand these types of offerings for users of web archives.