Twenty years, here at the Internet Archive, we’ve been trying to capture lightning in a bottle. How do you archive the “ethereal, ephemeral, unstable and unreliable“ Web? Since 1996, that has been part of our daily work. We crawl the Web, preserve it, try to make it play back, as if you were back in 1999 on your own GeoCities page, delighting in that animated Under Construction GIF you just posted.
On October 26, 2016, we will be celebrating our 20th Anniversary, and we hope you will join us. We’ve been grappling with how to convey the enormity of our task. How do you visualize the universe whatsapp lead of the Web—the audio, images, Web pages, and software that we’ve been archiving for the last 20 years? , we’ll be presenting the work of media innovators, each trying to capture the ephemeral Web:
Cyberscape—Data visualization engineer, Owen Cornec and Internet Archive Data Scientist, Vinay Goel team up to create an interactive exploration of the top sites on the Web, as captured by the Wayback Machine as early as 1996.
deleted-cities
Deleted Cities—Artist Richard Vijgen’s interactive visualization of GeoCities, once the Web’s largest online community. When Yahoo decided GeoCities was obsolete in 2009, the Internet Archive and Archive Team rushed to preserve tens of millions of GeoCities “homestead” pages before they were erased. Vijgen’s work takes you back to the neighborhoods and virtual cities where a vibrant society once lived online.