Visualizing Digital Collections of Web Archives

An important problem in web archiving is understanding and presenting how a single page changes over time. This is not only important for researchers, but can also be useful in educating the general public about the temporal and dynamic nature of the web. A common method for presenting webpage change is to display a set of thumbnails of the mementos, or archived pages. Although this can be a useful way to display mementos, a problem arises when there are too many thumbnails to display. For example, the Internet Archive has over 17,000+ mementos for cnn.com over a 14 year span. So even if the Internet Archive has thumbnails for all the mementos, some form of sampling will be necessary because the cognitive load of processing all the mementos will be beyond what the user can handle. Our goal in this work was to develop tools that implement thumbnail summarization for TimeMaps. To do this we have developed the following tools: • a web service that allows anyone to view a TimeMap using thumbnail summarization, • a wayback add-on that can allow any archive using wayback to provide this service for their users, • an embeddable version to allow web page authors to embed an overview of past versions of their page into the live web version of the page itself; this will help to further the integration of the live web with the past web.