Thursday 29 October was #NationalCatDay so the UK Web Archive have taken the opportunity to answer the BIG question that everyone is asking – are cats better than dogs? It is a rivalry as old as time itself and whilst it might be tricky to empirically say who is ‘best’ we can prove who is the most popular in the UK web space.

Using the SHINE interface we can look at trends in all of the .uk websites, based on the number of pages that a certain term is used over the years 1996-2013.

We want to be sure to capture as many cat and dog references as possible so the following term is a good start: cat OR kitten OR moggy OR kitty, dog OR puppy OR mutt

And the winner is [drumroll]…….

CATS!

That casual air of superiority that cats have appears to be fully justified.

Also, in 2005, in what we are now calling ‘Peak Cat’, pages with a mention of cats accounted for 4.5% of the ENTIRE .uk domain, as captured by the Internet Archive. Yes indeed, the humble moggy is popular with humans.

Try your own trend analysis: https://www.webarchive.org.uk/shine

By Jason Webber, Web Archiving Engagement and Liaison Manager

A few months ago, a colleague suggested that we should come up with ways of helping people learn about the main stages of web archiving, and to help them understand some of the more common technical terminology.

I got a bit carried away…

…because at the same time, I’d been hearing a lot about Twine and about the interactive fiction that people can build using it. So, I thought, why not use a interactive fiction engine to built a ‘web archiving simulator’ that takes you through the core web archiving life-cycle? A way to ‘learn by doing’ without having all the baggage involved in doing it for real?

Well, because it’ll suck up a tonne of time learning about Twine and twinery.org and the two different versions and fiddling about with the structure and with the prose…

After a few evenings I ran out of steam, and the experiment has been sitting in browser tab since then, unfinished.

I enjoyed building it, but it’s really not going to get finished any time soon. I’m not even sure what ‘finished’ would look like any more. So I may as well publish it as it is. If you want to play the game of web archiving, click the link below…

Understanding Web Archiving

I’ve also made the source export available, which you should be able to upload at twinery.org if you want to extend it or just see how it works.

Let me know what you think!

Andy Jackson, British Library Web Archiving Technical Lead

x-post from http://anjackson.net/2015/08/19/web-archiving-twine/