The emergence and success of web platforms nurtured a trend within social studies: "Hyperlink is dead!". Capturing their users into mobile applications and specialised web interface to propose them a specific user experience (and business model), the platforms indeed created new information silos in the open World Wide Web space. The simplified availability of user behavioural data through these platforms APIs reinforced this idea in academic communities by providing scholars with an easy way to collect rich user centric data for their research. After discussing the methodological aspects of the web divide between platforms and classical websites, we will argue that although it becomes more and more invisible, the hyperlink, modern incarnation of intertextual links between documents, is still a central and structural element of the web. Hyperlinks remain an invaluable resource to turn the web into a research field in spite of the complexity to collect, manipulate and curate them. We will illustrate those methodological challenges by describing the choices we made in designing Hyphe, a tool dedicated to the creation of web corpora tailored for mining hypertexts. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Web mining; Web applications; Internet communications tools;
A new strand of literature aims at building the most comprehensive and accurate database of notable individuals. We collect a massive amount of data from various editions of and . Using deduplication techniques over these partially overlapping sources, we cross-verify each retrieved information. For some variables, adds 15% more information when missing in . We find very few errors in the part of the database that contains the most documented individuals but nontrivial error rates in the bottom of the notability distribution, due to sparse information and classification errors or ambiguity. Our strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived), including a third who are not present in the English edition of . Data collection is driven by specific social science questions on gender, economic growth, urban and cultural development. We document an Anglo-Saxon bias present in the English edition of , and document when it matters and when not.
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