What Did It Look Like: A service for creating website timelapses using the Memento framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces WDILL, a service that creates website timelapses from archived web pages across years, enhancing visualization and sharing capabilities for better exploration of web history.

Contribution

It extends the WDILL Twitter bot with new features like date range requests, diversified memento selection, and social sharing, improving web archive visualization.

Findings

Enhanced visualizations and sharing options implemented.

Supports exploration of web archive temporal progression.

Improved user engagement with diversified memento selection.

Abstract

Popular web pages are archived frequently, which makes it difficult to visualize the progression of the site through the years at web archives. The What Did It Look Like (WDILL) Twitter bot shows web page transitions by creating a timelapse of a given website using one archived copy from each calendar year. Originally implemented in 2015, we recently added new features to WDILL, such as date range requests, diversified memento selection, updated visualizations, and sharing visualizations to Instagram. This would allow scholars and the general public to explore the temporal nature of web archives.