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Use cases
This is an inventory of use cases for the development of LinkGate, a scalable web archive graph visualization environment geared towards web archive research.
- Using LinkGate to track the promulgation of content through a web archive
Problem statement: information overload and the rapidity of spread of rumors Close reading, unable to see multiple hops of sharing and influence Lack of context (# of outlinks doesn’t tell you the reason behind it)
Goal: To visually represent the inception and flow of content through the web, and create a networked representation of the resulting relationships and influence over time.
Benefits: To be able to identify authoritative sources of pertinent information, as well as sources of mis- and dis-information, to measure reach and impact of particular sources, to counter factually incorrect and potentially dangerous sources of misinformation
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to provide tailored viewshafts into web archives
Problem statement: Due to the overwhelming amount of resources in a web archive, visualisations end up unwieldy or jarring for the user due to the massive amount of links contained. Users express being unable to make sense of the so-called ‘fuzzy hairball’ or tangled mess of links.
Goal: To cull or hide sections of data within the visualisation that are extraneous or unnecessary to a particular research topic, to obtain a neater visual representation that is easier to interpret.
Benefits: To be able to save, share, and export different viewshafts that have been created, to increase the value and impact of the web archive content in focus.
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to tag and group web archive content with attributes
Problem statement: Identifying groups and clusters of similar sites, and tagging
Goal: To split outlinks into categories by domain, or other attributes such as geography
Benefits: Actions resulting from that tagging... To be more easily able to sort and categorise pieces of data according to specific attributes such as geographic location, domain type, etc. To enable robust interpretation of data by being able to detect trends and patterns, thereby facilitating the creation of knowledge.
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to visualise images and texts
Problem statement: Visualising in- and out-links does not tell the researcher why Person A is linking to Person B, or whether A’s opinion of B is positive or negative. Key context is missing from the resulting analysis.
Goal: To be able to include text and images in the linkage between the node and target site, and visualise text and images
Benefits: Including accompanying text and images in linkage provides missing context.
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to preprocess links before loading into visualisation software
Problem statement: Most visualisation software like Gephi don’t scale, so the researcher spends huge amounts of time to cull the datasets to be able to ‘fit’ into the visualisation software. Preprocessing of links to create a tailored dataset to visualise is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and cumbersome process.
Goal: To scale up to visualising the dataset in its entirety
Benefits: To be able to save time and effort on preprocessing the datasets, and to streamline the preprocessing process to include only relevant domains.
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to visualise crawl log data
Problem statement: Most tools are geared towards text analysis or network graphs i.e. to study the data of the sites as the focus. Most tools do not have the capability to incorporate the metadata contained in the crawl logs as part of the analysis.
Goal: To create a visual representation of the metadata headers in crawl logs
Benefits: To be able to conduct change visualisation; to detect how settings evolved over time and whether a correlation exists with changes occurring in the Web; to visualise changes in temporal characteristics
Actors: researcher, LinkGate
- Using LinkGate to create curated web archive views for classrooms, or different audiences
Problem statement: To increase awareness of web archives as an historical, social, and cultural educational resource, national cultural heritage institutions that archive the Web include outreach to schools as part of their strategic initiatives. So far, this is tricky because of the unwieldy nature of large-scale web archives, and hence the difficulty of efficiently extracting needed information to render into a manageable visualisation that invites interpretation.
Goal: To efficiently extract thematic document collections from large-scale web archives to provide curated views into a web archive
Benefits: To make web archives less daunting; to promote web archives to non-computer or data scientists as a valuable educational resource