From 686e113871e1be8d4852ad561c65b42b586a079b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ryan Deschamps Date: Fri, 19 May 2017 17:29:59 -0400 Subject: [PATCH 01/11] Add some images and basic template for pages. --- app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb | 118 +++++++++++++++++--------- app/views/static_pages/about.html.erb | 60 +++---------- 2 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 87 deletions(-) diff --git a/app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb b/app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb index 1bae59a..a9f5ed4 100644 --- a/app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb +++ b/app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb @@ -1,51 +1,89 @@
-

<%= t('blacklight.Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge') %>

- - +

<%= t('blacklight.Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge') %>

+
- Political Link Graph -

Big Data is reshaping the historical profession and society in ways we are only now beginning to grasp. Tremendous new opportunities are opening up for social and cultural historians. Large web archives contain billions of webpages, from personal homepages to professional or academic websites, offering the ability to reconstruct large-scale aspects of the recent past. Yet the sheer size of these primary sources presents significant challenges: if the norm until the digital era was to have human information vanish, “now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially” (as James Gleick noted in his 2012 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood).

-

Welcome to the Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK) Project. Spearheaded by the University of Waterloo, York University, and the University of Alberta, we are bringing together Canadian partners to provide access to their collections.

+

About this Project

+

This is the home of the Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK) Project, a collaborative effort by the University of Waterloo, the University of Alberta, and York University to bring Canadian Web archival partners together.

-
-

Our partners

-

Our project provides access to the holdings of six partners across Canada. For each collection, click on the logo below to be brought to collections information, datasets, and search portals. Or dig in above to search them all!

- Unviersity of Alberta Libraries - Dalhousie University logo - Simon Fraser University logo - Unviersity of Toronto Libraries - Unviersity of Victoria Libraries - University of Winnipeg logo + + + + +
+

ANOTHER CATEGORY

+ + + + + + + + + +
Example Network File 1
+
Example Network File 2
+
Example Network File 2
+
Example Network File 2
+ +

+
+ +

AND ANOTHER CATEGORY

+ + + + + + + + +
Example Network File 1
+
Example Network File 2
+
Example Network File 2
+
Example Network File 2
+

+

-
-

Acknowlegements

-

This research was supported by Compute Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional support was forthcoming from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation's Early Researcher Award.

- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council wordmark and logo - Compute Canada wordmark and logo - Ontario logo \ No newline at end of file +$(function() { +$('#carousel_CATEGORY1').on('click', function(e) { +alert("hey!"); +e.preventDefault(); + +if ($('#about-content').html() == "") { +$('#about-content').load($(this).attr("href"), function() { +$('#about-content').show(); +}); +} else { +$('#about-content').toggle(); +} +}); +}); + diff --git a/app/views/static_pages/about.html.erb b/app/views/static_pages/about.html.erb index fe104a3..6e8db3b 100644 --- a/app/views/static_pages/about.html.erb +++ b/app/views/static_pages/about.html.erb @@ -12,59 +12,25 @@

About this Project

This is the home of the Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge (WALK) Project, a collaborative effort by the University of Waterloo, the University of Alberta, and York University to bring Canadian Web archival partners together.

-

Why is this important? Web archives have a lot of very useful information in them! As websites disappear every second on the Web, we need to save sites now. Luckily, we've been saving sites since 2005: even if they don't exist on the live web today, we may have them saved for historical research.

-

For example, did you know that the Green Party of Canada ran a public blog on their website back in 2008, where anybody could write in? Today, if you try to visit them, you'll receive a "403 Access Denied error").

-

With literally millions of pages – there are 14,490,355 "documents" in the archive found here – you sometimes need to pull your gaze back to see how ideas have risen and fallen. We've tentatively found that left-wing groups tended to use the word "depression" more than centrist or right-wingers, who used "recession" more during the economic crisis? There is a literal treasure trove of stories to be found in these collections, limited only by your imagination.

-

On this site, we currently provide access to the University of Toronto's Archive-It Collection of Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups, which they have been collecting since late 2005. For information on what is within this collection, please see the University of Toronto's page.

-

We would love your comments and suggestions. Please contact Professor Ian Milligan (History, University of Waterloo) at i2millig@uwaterloo.ca.

-

Some Necessary Caveats

-

The generated results need to be used with caution. As you can see from this example visualization from the political parties collection, the composition of archival collections changes dramatically over time: spikes and valleys may not be representative of actual historic shifts, but changes in the material. Similarly, the random search will be pulling results from tens, or even hundreds of thousands of results - many of which are automatically-generated pages within the web structure of these sites. Always dig into things, and question the results you are getting (which you should do with all databases, of course).

-

We began with some provocative examples above, but we really do want to stress how you need to use these results with caution. The underlying data is messy. If you really want to get into this material - exploring link graphs, or playing with the plain text of a decade of a political party's website - alternative research approaches such as the warcbase platform might be more fruitful.

-
-

Project Team

-
  • Ian Milligan, assistant professor of history at the University of Waterloo and principal investigator of the Web Archives for Historical Research Group. Milligan is PI of the Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portals application that prprovides the infrastructure behind WALK.
    • -
  • Nick Ruest, digital assets librarian at York University. He oversees the development of data curation, asset management and preservation initiatives, along with creating and implementing systems that support the capture, description, delivery, and preservation of digital objects having significant content of enduring values. Ruest is co-PI of the Compute Canada Research Platforms and Portals WALK application.
    • -
  • Geoff Harder, Associate University Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL). His responsibilities include strategic development of UAL's digital initiatives, which includes research data management, repositories, and digital scholarship support. Geoff serves on a number of national and international data and preservation organizations, including the National Executive Committee for the Consortia for Advancing Standards in Research Administrative Data (CASRAI), the Board of Directors for the CLOCKSS preservation network (an extension of Stanford's LOCKSS technology), and the Advisory Committee committee for the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) based out of Simon Fraser University. Geoff has been actively involved in the development of the web archiving program at the University of Alberta since its beginning in 2010.
    • -
  • Dr. Umar Qasim is the Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Alberta Libraries and responsible for the libraries digital preservation program. He maintains and shares expertise on digital preservation with the University of Alberta Libraries, the University community, and the professional community of practice in large. His research interests lie in the areas of digital preservation, wireless sensor networks, information retrieval, information filtering, text mining and optimization.
    • -
  • Sam Popowich is Discovery Systems Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. He is responsible for the libraries' discovery strategy, including Blacklight implementation. GitHub, Twitter: @@redlibrarian
    • -
  • Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. He has published on textual visualization and analysis, and computing in the humanities including a book the MIT Press, Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. He is a co-developer of Voyant Tools, a suite of text analysis tools, and leads the TAPoR project documenting text tools. He is currently the Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study and blogs at theoreti.ca.
    • -
  • Dr. Todd Suomela is CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in the Sciences and Social Sciences at the University of Alberta. He works on collection assessment, project management, web archive education, documentation, and research outreach. He studies the use of web archives in scholarly research, crowdsourcing in the humanities and sciences, and research data management across disciplines. He has published and presented on citizen science, digital humanities, web archiving, and data quality. His personal website is at toddsuomela.com and he can be followed on Twitter @@tsuomela.
    • -
  • Sonya Betz is Digital Initiatives Projects Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is responsible for the project management and coordination of a wide range of digital initiatives, and is the service manager for UAL's journal publishing program. She works with project teams to define and integrate end-user needs into application development, and has published and presented on user experience in digital repositories and discovery tools.
    • -
  • Peter Binkley is the Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. He leads the Digital Initiatives development team in various collaborations with librarians and other stakeholders, to develop repository and preservation services and systems for the library's digital collections.
    • -
    + -