Social Cards Probably Provide For Better Understanding Of Web Archive Collections

Abstract

Used by a variety of researchers, web archive collections have become invaluable sources of evidence. If a researcher is presented with a web archive collection that they did not create, how do they know what is inside so that they can use it for their own research? Search engine results and social media links are represented as surrogates, small easily digestible summaries of the underlying page. Search engines and social media have a different focus, and hence produce different surrogates than web archives. Search engine surrogates help a user answer the question "Will this link meet my information need?" Social media surrogates help a user decide "Should I click on this?" Our use case is subtly different. We hypothesize that groups of surrogates together are useful for summarizing a collection. We want to help users answer the question of "What does the underlying collection contain?" But which surrogate should we use? With Mechanical Turk participants, we evaluate six different surrogate types against each other. We find that the type of surrogate does not influence the time to complete the task we presented the participants. Of particular interest are social cards, surrogates typically found on social media, and browser thumbnails, screen captures of web pages rendered in a browser. At p = 0.0569, and p = 0.0770, respectively, we find that social cards and social cards paired side-by-side with browser thumbnails probably provide better collection understanding than the surrogates currently used by the popular Archive-It web archiving platform. We measure user interactions with each surrogate and find that users interact with social cards less than other types. The results of this study have implications for our web archive summarization work, live web curation platforms, social media, and more. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Digital libraries and archives; World Wide Web; Web searching and information discovery; • Applied computing → Digital libraries and archives.

It's All About The Cards: Sharing on Social Media Probably Encouraged HTML Metadata Growth

“…Social cards typically consist of a striking image, title, description, and source attribution. In prior work [3], we demonstrated that groups of social cards perform best for understanding collections. Social cards have become standard currency in the sharing culture, existing not only on social media platforms, but also in messaging apps like Apple Messages, storytelling services like Wakelet 1 , and News articles represent resources that have undergone editorial review, receiving some care in their publication.…”

The Past Web

“…Existing web page summarisation tools, like Embed.ly and microlink , misattribute a Memento to the wrong source and fail to separate web archive branding from Memento content, so Jones et al (Jones et al, 2019) created MementoEmbed. MementoEmbed makes use of Memento headers and TimeMaps to find information about Mementos and provides added value over other services.…”

Automatically Selecting Striking Images for Social Cards

“…Both allow for previewing a page and allow pages to "compete for clicks" relative to rivals that might be present elsewhere on the page. Textual information is important, but a good striking image can also help readers better understand the underlying document [15]. As shown in the Twitter card from Figure 1, the title and description give the reader some idea of the information found in the underlying page, but the striking image provides the additional insight of a current map of COVID-19 infection locations, helping the user infer that not only is a visualization available at this resource, but that it is also updated to contain current information.…”