The Problem
Web archive collections are easier to create thanks to advances in technology. They are created by archivists and researchers, but live a life outside of those initial projects.
- Collections can consist of hundreds or thousands of seeds. Each seed has many versions (mementos). This means that the user must go through thousands of documents in order to review and compare collections.
- There are more than 8,000 collections within the Internet Archive's Archive-It platform alone.
- There are multiple collections about the same concept. For example, there are more than 30 collections about "human rights."
- The metadata for each collection is non-existent, or inconsistently applied.
- Human review of these mementos for collection understanding is an expensive proposition.
How is the future user of a web archive collection to know which collection is right for them?
The Framework
The Dark and Stormy Archives Project intends to produce stories by selecting representative mementos from web archive collections. Each story consists of around 28 mementos telling the user about the collection. Each of these mementos is visualized as a surrogate, and together they become a story. Each story is thus a summary of summaries.
The storm photo used above is by Maxime Raynal and is available to remix and use, with attribution, via Wikimedia Commons.
