Tools for Preserving Performative Media

Ilya Kreymer
Webrecorder Lead Developer, Harvard LIL Summer Fellow

Dragan Espenschied
Preservation Director at Rhizome

#RhizomeTools

What is Performative Media?

Media Performing Their Objecthood

“Object” vs “Artifact”

The Tools

Webrecorder

Preserving The Dynamic Web

oldweb.today

Preserving Web Browsers + Web Archives

EaaS Framework

Emulation Preservation Strategy

Webrecorder

A new, fully open source tool for creating high-fidelity, standard-compliant web archives —

stewarded by an arts organization.

What is
Symmetrical Archiving?

In Web Archiving, archiving and access are typically thought about as two different things, represented by two software pieces: a crawler and an access system.

Crawlers simulate a subset of the functionality of a real browser.
Users expect an archive to reflect how the web looks for a user.
No guarantee that crawled material will replay in access system.
Feedback on the crawl is delayed until the crawl is finished.
Crawlers need lots of technical parameters to retrieve resources that belong to a perceived object.

crawl

seed

scoping

An Alternative:
Symmetrical Archiving

A single, symmetrical system for “recording” and “access”. The user browses in the same way to create the archive and to access it. Same “symmetrical” environment and software stack and code path as much as possible.

Webrecorder concepts

User → Collection → Recording → Web resources

Recordings and
“Worm’s Eye Perspective”

Typically, in Web Archiving we use to think that a web resource is defined by URL and time of access. But that only represents one perspective, and often not a very relevant one. The focus for Webrecorder is preserving the full context visible to a web user.