(Left) President Obama and the President Elect, and (Right) Whitehouse.gov in the Wayback Machine.

Archives Unleashed 3.0, The Internet Archive

Collaborators:
  • Mohamed Aturban (Old Dominion University)
  • Justin Littman (George Washington University)
  • Jessica Ogden (University of Southampton)
  • Yu Xu (University of Southern California)
  • Shawn Walker (University of Washington)

This project came about as part of the Archives Unleashed 3.0 event hosted at the Internet Archive Feb 23-24, 2017. The group came together around an interest in using the End of Term web archives to assess change in the web presence of each presidential administration - at the time of transition. We hoped to use multiple ways of characterising six government domains over a three month period around the 2001/2005/2009/2013/2017 transitions. The goal was to assess whether the rate and type of change between administrations could be characterised as different, or indeed if they are in fact largely similar in terms of rate and types of changes to each website.

More on the methodology, code and results of our project can be found on the project pages on GitHub.

Awards

Of note, the project won ‘Best Project’ at Archives Unleashed 3.0.

Project members accepting our award for Best Project at Archives Unleashed 3.0, the Internet Archive.