Know(ing) Infrastructure: The Wayback Machine as object and instrument of digital research

Abstract

From documenting human rights abuses to studying online advertising, web archives are increasingly positioned as critical resources for a broad range of scholarly Internet research agendas. In this article, we reflect on the motivations and methodological challenges of investigating the world’s largest web archive, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (IAWM). Using a mixed methods approach, we report on a pilot project centred around documenting the inner workings of ‘Save Page Now’ (SPN) – an Internet Archive tool that allows users to initiate the creation and storage of ‘snapshots’ of web resources. By improving our understanding of SPN and its role in shaping the IAWM, this work examines how the public tool is being used to ‘save the Web’ and highlights the challenges of operationalising a study of the dynamic sociotechnical processes supporting this knowledge infrastructure. Inspired by existing Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches, the paper charts our development of methodological interventions to support an interdisciplinary investigation of SPN, including: ethnographic methods, ‘experimental blackbox tactics’, data tracing, modelling and documentary research. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of our methodology when interfacing with issues associated with temporality, scale and visibility, as well as critically engage with our own positionality in the research process (in terms of expertise and access). We conclude with reflections on the implications of digital STS approaches for ‘knowing infrastructure’, where the use of these infrastructures is unavoidably intertwined with our ability to study the situated and material arrangements of their creation.

Pluralising critical technical practice

“…Special issue contributors discuss and offer approaches to critically reappropriating online devices and digital infrastructures as the 'methods of the media' (Rogers, 2013;Weltevrede, 2016); cf. Ogden et al (2023), Rieder et al (2022), andChao et al (2024) in this special issue), in order to access and assess their 'cascades of inscriptions' (Ruppert et al, 2013), creating awareness for their workings, their glitches, and flaws. This can be done through active and deliberate application of the underlying technologies and infrastructures, including AI and specifically ML techniques (Chávez Heras (2023) and Sánchez Querubín and Niederer (2022) in this issue) as well as through computational tool(-) making (Chao et al (2024) and Rieder et al (2022) in this issue).…”

“…By conducting a ‘feasibility analysis’ of these documents, Pawlicka-Deger (2022) unpacks the social, technical, and management issues that arise in the process of creating digital artefacts within the context of the Digital Humanities, also aiming at offering a methodological framework for the analysis of documents produced in this field and posing questions about the sociotechnical quality of digital production. Ogden et al (2023) paper ‘Know(ing) infrastructure: The Wayback Machine as object and instrument of digital research' reports on a pilot project concerned with documenting the inner-workings of ‘Save Page Now’ (SPN), an Internet Archive tool that allows users to initiate the creation and storage of ‘snapshots’ of web resources. Considering SNP in the context of documenting human rights abuses, the authors engage with the relationship between how digital infrastructures create new knowledge about the world, their implications and the new methodologies needed to understand them for a meaningful interaction.…”

“…This special issue invites more work that explores what it means to – building on Annemarie Mol (2008) – collaboratively tinker with technologies in order to question their ‘ontological politics’ and write about this form of labour and interaction with other scholars and practitioners, and – highly complex – computational ‘knowledge infrastructures’ (cf. Ogden et al, 2023).…”

Creating disinformation: Archiving fake links on the Wayback Machine viewed through the lens of routine activity theory

“…The role of Internet archivists has been examined using ethnographic approaches (Ogden, et al, 2017). Quality and veracity of the archival record of the Web has been discussed, highlighting its strengths and limitations (Nguyen and Weber, 2015;Gaffney and Matias, 2018;Ogden, et al, 2023). Murphy, et al (2007) discussed the potential of the Wayback Machine as a tool for investigating validity across the fields of e-commerce, information systems and computer-mediated communication.…”

WEB HISTORIES IN THE MAKING: WEB ARCHIVES & THE LOGICS OF PRACTICE

“…Web archive criticism has identified the opportunities and limitations of web archives as data (Rogers 2017;Brügger 2018). Studies have shown how web archives are fundamentally shaped by the infrastructures of web archiving (Summers and Punzalan 2017;Ben-David and Amram 2018;Webster 2017;Dougherty and Meyer 2014;Hegarty 2022b;Ogden, Summers, and Walker 2023), the practices that produce web archives (Summers 2020;Ogden, Halford, and Carr 2017) and the 'archivability' of the Web (Kelly et al 2013;Banos and Manolopoulos 2016). This form of source criticism is further complicated by the sociotechnical complexity of web archives (Ben-David and Huurdeman 2014;Brügger 2012;Rogers 2017), often making it difficult for researchers to address the provenance of data (Maemura et al 2018), or trace back the decision-making processes to a single cause.…”