This document summarizes past and recent web archive activities conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). It describes projects from 2008-2015 funded by JISC, AHRC, and IIPC that involved analyzing large web archive datasets capturing the UK domain. These projects extracted metadata, links, and temporal data from over 30TB of archived web pages to study topics like the growth of UK universities online and how government and media presence has changed over time. Current work includes additional case studies and making the processed UK domain data openly available to support research on the history and evolution of the British web space.

1. Ancient History of the UK Web
With support by and thanks to Ning Wang and Adham Tamer
Josh Cowls, Scott A. Hale, Helen Margetts,
Eric T. Meyer, Ralph Schroeder, Taha Yasseri

2. Past Web Archive Activities at OII
• 2008-2009. JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration: World Wide Web of
Humanities (Jisc & NEH funded)
– OII, Internet Archive, Hanzo Archives
– Meyer, E.T., Carpenter, K., Middleton, M. (2009). World Wide Web of Humanities: Final
Report to JISC. Online:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/humanitiesfinalrepor
t.pdf
• 2010. Researcher Engagement with Web Archives (Jisc funded)
– OII, VKS
– Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T., Madsen, C., van den Heuvel, C., Thomas, A., Wyatt, S. (2010).
Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art. London: JISC. Online:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1714997 and http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/544/
– Thomas, A., Meyer, E.T., Dougherty, M., van den Heuvel, C., Madsen, C., Wyatt, S. (2010).
Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: Challenges and Opportunities for
Investment. London: JISC. Online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1715000 and http://ie-
repository.jisc.ac.uk/543/
– Dougherty, M., Meyer, E.T. (2014). Community, Tools, and Practices in Web Archiving:
The state of the art in relation to social science and humanities research needs. Journal
of the American Society of Information Science & Technology.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23099/abstract
• 2011. Using Web Archives: A Futures Perspective (IIPC funded)
– OII
– Meyer, E.T., Thomas, A.J., Schroeder, R. (2011). Web Archives: The Future(s). London:
IIPC. Online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1830025

3. Recent Web Archive Activities at OII
• 2013-2015: Jisc Big Data project (Jisc funded)
– OII, British Library
– Prepare and release hyperlink corpus
• 2014-2015: Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities (AHRC
funded)
– IHR, OII, British Library
– Supporting researchers in Arts & Humanities to use web archive data
– Producing edited book of empirical studies concerning the history of
the UK web
• First paper from these combined projects
– Hale, S.A., Yasseri, T., Cowls, J., Meyer, E.T., Schroeder, R., Margetts, H.
(2014, July). Mapping the UK webspace: Fifteen years of British
universities on the web. ACM WebSci’14, Bloomington, Indiana.
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2435481 or
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2856

4. Big Data:
Demonstrating the Value of the UK Web Domain Dataset
for Social Science Research
This project aims to enhance JISC's UK Web
Domain archive, a 30 TB archive of the .uk
country-code top level domain collected from
1996 to 2010. It will extract link graphs from the
data and disseminate social science research
using the collection.
February 2012 - February 2014

5. Taming a mammoth:
Web Archive Dataset Preparation
30 TB compressed data
6.2TB metadata and links
2.5 TB temporal links

6. 30 TB compressed data in (w)arc format
– Approx. 4.5 million files
– Mix of binary and plain text payloads along
with header data
– Two formats: old arc and newer warc
Housed at the BL, access restrictions

7. WARC/1.0
WARC-Type: response
WARC-Target-URI: http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-blogs,guardiangu-news,guardiangu-
network/1/H.22.2/56938?ns=guardian&pageName=Prisoner+of+war+camps+in+the+UK+mapped+and+listed.+Download+the+d
ata%3AGraphic%3A1476560&ch=News&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=History+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CSecond+world+war+
%28News%29%2CGermany%2CUK+news%2CTechnology&c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CCorporate+IT&c6=Simon+Roger
s&c7=10-Nov-
08&c8=1476560&c9=Graphic&c10=Blogpost&c11=News&c13=&c25=Datablog&c30=content&h2=GU%2FNews%2Fblog%2FDa
tablog&c2=GUID:(none)
WARC-Date: 2010-12-05T02:58:00Z
WARC-Payload-Digest: sha1:3I42H3S6NNFQ2MSVX7XZKYAYSCX5QBYJ
WARC-IP-Address: 66.235.138.18
WARC-Record-ID: <urn:uuid:7d5ce147-9b4b-46cb-8975-ee93b4d0dda8>
Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response
Content-Length: 740
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT
Server: Omniture DC/2.0.0
X-C: ms-4.3.1
Expires: Sat, 04 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:58:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0, proxy-revalidate, no-transform, private
Pragma: no-cache
ETag: "4CFAFFB8-0E4C-7443902F"
Vary: *
P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR NID PSA OUR IND COM NAV STA"
Location: http://b.scorecardresearch.com/r?c2=6035250&d.c=gif&d.o=guardiangu-
network&d.x=243551159&d.t=page&d.u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fdatablog%2F2010%2Fnov%2F08
%2Fprisoner-of-war-camps-uk
xserver: www422
Content-Length: 0
Keep-Alive: timeout=15
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

8. Extract meta-data and links (wat format)
– Approx. 4.5 million files
– 6.2TB on disk compressed
– Housed at OII
– Structured JSON
– Different formats for arc/warcs

9. {
"Container": {
"Filename": "DOTUK-HISTORICAL-1996-2010-GROUP-AA-XAAAAA-20110428000000-
00000.arc.gz",
"Offset": "88937",
"Compressed": true,
"Gzip-Metadata": {
"Header-Length": "10",
"Inflated-CRC": "-1223265901",
"Inflated-Length": "26073",
"Deflate-Length": "4463",
"Footer-Length": "8"
}
},
"Envelope": {
"ARC-Header-Length": "102",
"ARC-Header-Metadata": {
"Date": "20080509081524",
"Target-URI": "http://www.ukhomeinteriors.co.uk/content/ext_corbels.php",
"Content-Length": "25970",
"Content-Type": "text/html",
"IP-Address": "83.223.106.10"
},
"Payload-Metadata": {
"Actual-Content-Type": "application/http; msgtype=response",
"Block-Digest": "sha1:MCCZNOKBJHTZ5MMMCUJGBPE25C2TVUWF",
"HTTP-Response-Metadata": {
"Headers-Length": "591",
"HTML-Metadata": {
"Head": {
"Title": "Exterior Corbels",

10. Plain text lists
Build own ad-hawk Hadoop cluster, fix
incompatibilities, divide into smaller batches
– Build plain text lists of pages and hyperlinks
– Remove error page (e.g., 404 Not Found)
– Remove pages not in .uk
– Standardize dates (many formats)
– Standardize hyperlinks (trailing /, etc.)
– Fix/remove tons of invalid hyperlinks (whitespace,
invalid characters, etc.)
Load results into Apache Hive (2.5 TB)

11. Source Destination Time
LinkText
http://octopus.well.ox.ac.uk:80/
http://octopus.well.ox.ac.uk:80/links.html
1032758438
Links
http://octopus.well.ox.ac.uk:80/
http://octopus.well.ox.ac.uk:80/projects.html
1001793436
Projects
http://octopus.well.ox.ac.uk:80/computing.sht
ml
http://debian.org/
1075794060
Debian/GNU

12. Overall Statistics
Third-level-
domains:
e.g.
ox.ac.uk

13. Relative size of second-level-domains

14. Number of links within SLD per node

15. Cross-domain links (2010)
Absolute Normalized to target size

16. Case of ac.uk
Mapping the UK Webspace:
Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web
Hale et al., WebSci'14, available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2856
121 UK universities
websites and links
1) League table ranking
2) Group affiliation
3) Geographical location

17. Group Affiliations

18. League table ranking

19. Geography
Colour ~ intensity

20. Gravity Law σ𝑖𝑗 =
𝑠𝑖𝑗
𝑠𝑖
𝑜𝑢𝑡
𝑠𝑗
𝑖𝑛
𝑠𝑖𝑗 =
𝑠𝑖
𝑜𝑢𝑡
𝑠𝑗
𝑖𝑛
𝑟0.28

21. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and
Humanities
Primary aim: developing a methodological and
theoretical framework within which to study over 15
years of UK domain data – with lessons for the
future study of web archives more generally

22. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and
Humanities
The dataset:
– Crawled from 1996 – 2013
– Approximately 65 TB, billions of words
– Building interface to allow search by retrieval
date, target domain of links, sentiment
– Allow qualitative and quantitative analysis – and
iteration between multiple research techniques

23. Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and
Humanities
Key outputs:
– Ten bursary projects using web archive data to
investigate a broad range of topics, for example…
• Armed services recruitment online
• The accessibility of the web for disabled users
• Online discussions of ‘Beat’ poetry
– An edited book of empirical studies concerning the
history of the UK web, featuring chapters on, for
example…
• Constitutional and institutional change in UK government
• The BBC’s online presence
• The ‘web of faith’ online

24. Next
● Studies underway at OII, BL, IHR
● Book and articles
– Study overall growth of .uk
– Case study of .gov.uk
– Study of media and select committee
visibility
● Releasing data open source