Anat Ben-David

Coming to terms: a conflict analysis of the usage, in official and unofficial sources, of ‘security fence’, ‘apartheid wall’, and other terms for the structure between Israel and the Palestinian territories

The official terms for the dividing wall are ‘security fence’ on the Israeli side and ‘apartheid wall’ on the Palestinian side. Both terms fuse two contextually charged notions to describe the construction project. Beyond the two official terms, the structure has been given other names by sources appearing in the media space (e.g. the International Court of Justice’s ‘West Bank wall’) or by news organizations covering the issue (e.g. ‘barrier wall’). Using data from Google News, which includes official NGO as well as news sources, this article offers a media monitoring method that also seeks to create conflict indicators from the shifting language employed by officials, journalists and others to describe the structure. The authors discovered that the Palestinians and Israelis choose their words differently: the Israelis are consistent (yet relatively alone) in the way they use their terms; the Palestinians adopt their terminology according to the setting, using different terms for the structure in diplomatic and international court settings than ‘at home’. Having identified ‘setting’ as an important variable in the study of language use as conflict indicator, the study also includes an analysis of diplomatic language in key debates on the obstacle at the UN Security Council. In all, it was found that, at particular moments in time, Israeli and Palestinian actors ‘come to terms’ most significantly around ‘separation wall’, coupling the Israeli left-of-centre adjective and the Palestinian noun, implying a peace-related arrangement distinctive from either side’s official position (as well as the current peace plans), and ultimately undesirable to those who share the term.

Web Archive Search as Research: Methodological and Theoretical Implications

The field of web archiving is at a turning point. In the early years of web archiving, the single URL has been the dominant unit for preservation and access. Access tools such as the Internet Archives Wayback Machine reflect this notion as they allowed consultation, or browsing, of one URL at a time. In recent years, however, the single URL approach to accessing web archives is being gradually replaced by search interfaces. This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological implications of the transition to search on web archive research. It introduces ‘search as research’ methods, practices already applied in studies of the live web, which can be repurposed and implemented for critically studying archived web data. Such methods open up a variety of analytical practices that were so far precluded by the single URL entry point to the web archive, such as the re-assemblage of existing collections around a theme or an event, the study of archival artefacts and scaling the unit of analysis from the single URL to the full archive, by generating aggregate views and summaries. The paper introduces examples to ‘search as research’ scenarios, which have been developed by the WebART project at the University of Amsterdam and the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, in collaboration with the National Library of the Netherlands. The paper concludes with a discussion of current and potential limitations of ‘search as research’ methods for studying web archives, and the ways with which they can be overcome in the near future.

What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain

This article argues that the use of the Web as a primary source for studying the history of nations is conditioned by the structural ties between sovereignty and the Internet protocol, and by a temporal proximity between live and archived websites. The argument is illustrated by an empirical reconstruction of the history of the top-level domain of Yugoslavia (.yu), which was deleted from the Internet in 2010. The archival discovery method used four lists of historical .yu Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that were captured from the live Web before the domain was deleted, and an automated hyperlink discovery script that retrieved their snapshots from the Internet Archive and reconstructed their immediate hyperlinked environment in a network. Although a considerable portion of the historical .yu domain was found on the Internet Archive, the reconstructed space was predominantly Serbian.

Lost but not forgotten: finding pages on the unarchived web

Web archives attempt to preserve the fast changing web, yet they will always be incomplete. Due to restrictions in crawling depth, crawling frequency, and restrictive selection policies, large parts of the Web are unarchived and, therefore, lost to posterity. In this paper, we propose an approach to uncover unarchived web pages and websites and to reconstruct different types of descriptions for these pages and sites, based on links and anchor text in the set of crawled pages. We experiment with this approach on the Dutch Web Archive and evaluate the usefulness of page and host-level representations of unarchived content. Our main findings are the following: First, the crawled web contains evidence of a remarkable number of unarchived pages and websites, potentially dramatically increasing the coverage of a Web archive. Second, the link and anchor text have a highly skewed distribution: popular pages such as home pages have more links pointing to them and more terms in the anchor text, but the richness tapers off quickly. Aggregating web page evidence to the host-level leads to significantly richer representations, but the distribution remains skewed. Third, the succinct representation is generally rich enough to uniquely identify pages on the unarchived web: in a known-item search setting we can retrieve unarchived web pages within the first ranks on average, with host-level representations leading to further improvement of the retrieval effectiveness for websites.

Uncovering the unarchived web

Many national and international heritage institutes realize the importance of archiving the web for future culture heritage. Web archiving is currently performed either by harvesting a national domain, or by crawling a pre-defined list of websites selected by the archiving institution. In either method, crawling results in more information being harvested than just the websites intended for preservation; which could be used to reconstruct impressions of pages that existed on the live web of the crawl date, but would have been lost forever. We present a method to create representations of what we will refer to as a web collections (aura): the web documents that were not included in the archived collection, but are known to have existed --- due to their mentions on pages that were included in the archived web collection. To create representations of these unarchived pages, we exploit the information about the unarchived URLs that can be derived from the crawls by combining crawl date distribution, anchor text and link structure. We illustrate empirically that the size of the aura can be substantial: in 2012, the Dutch Web archive contained 12.3M unique pages, while we uncover references to 11.9M additional (unarchived) pages.

The Palestinian diaspora on the Web: Between de-territorialization and re-territorialization:

This article analyzes Web-based networks of Palestinian communities in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Australia, the United States, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. The findings show a thematic and demographic shift from organizations of Palestinian communities abroad to a transnational solidarity network focused on Palestinian rights and the Boycott movement. Although the Palestinian Territories function as the network’s strong center of gravity, analysis of the references reveals that diaspora and non-diaspora actors operate as two distinct but intertwined networks: while diaspora actors are unique in putting emphasis on community as activity type and on diaspora and the right of return as primary cause, non-diaspora actors are mainly dedicated to solidarity as activity and Palestinian rights and the Boycott movement as primary cause. Despite this, ties between diaspora and non-diaspora actors are stronger than among diaspora actors, which indicates that part of the dynamics of Palestinian communities is manifest not just between diaspora communities, but mostly between diaspora communities and civil society organizations in their host societies.

Finding pages on the unarchived web

Web archives preserve the fast changing Web, yet are highly incomplete due to crawling restrictions, crawling depth and frequency, or restrictive selection policies-most of the Web is unarchived and therefore lost to posterity. In this paper, we propose an approach to recover significant parts of the unarchived Web, by reconstructing descriptions of these pages based on links and anchors in the set of crawled pages, and experiment with this approach on the DutchWeb archive. Our main findings are threefold. First, the crawled Web contains evidence of a remarkable number of unarchived pages and websites, potentially dramatically increasing the coverage of the Web archive. Second, the link and anchor descriptions have a highly skewed distribution: popular pages such as home pages have more terms, but the richness tapers off quickly. Third, the succinct representation is generally rich enough to uniquely identify pages on the unarchived Web: in a known-item search setting we can retrieve these pages within the first ranks on average.

User comments across platforms and journalistic genres

ABSTRACT This study introduces a comparative approach to study user comments on the same news content across online platforms while distinguishing between soft and hard news genres. Empirical analysis focuses on Israel’s popular news website Ynet. Using automated tools, we scraped 17,347 comments to analyze differences in the quantity, length, and topics of comments that were posted through Ynet’s comments section, Facebook Comment Plugin, and Facebook page. Our findings reveal that commenting patterns vary greatly across platforms and news genres. Specifically, the number of comments posted on Ynet’s Facebook page is significantly higher than the two other commenting platforms (for both hard and soft news), but these comments are shorter and more emotional. We discuss these findings in relation to the notion of ‘context collapse’ in social media, and argue that one of the outcomes of the convergence between news content and social media is the augmentation of consensual national sentiment.

The Internet Archive and the socio-technical construction of historical facts

ABSTRACT This article analyses the socio-technical epistemic processes behind the construction of historical facts by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IAWM). Grounded in theoretical debates in Science and Technology Studies about digital and algorithmic platforms as “black boxes”, this article uses provenance information and other data traces provided by the IAWM to uncover specific epistemic processes embedded at its back-end, through a case study on the archiving of the North Korean web. In 2016, an error in the configuration of one of North Koreas name servers revealed that it contains 28 websites. However, the IAWM has snapshots of the majority of the .kp websites, which have been archived from as early as 2010. How did the IAWM accumulate knowledge about the .kp websites that are generally hidden to the world? Through our findings we argue that historical knowledge on the IAWM is generated by an entangled and iterative system comprised of proactive human contributions, routinely operated crawls and a reification of external, crowd-sourced knowledge devices. These turn the IAWM into a repository whose knowing of the past is potentially surplus – harbouring information which was unknown to each of the contributing actors at the time and place of archiving.

The colors of the national Web: visual data analysis of the historical Yugoslav Web domain

This study examines the use of visual data analytics as a method for historical investigation of national Webs, using Web archives. It empirically analyzes all graphically designed (non-photographic) images extracted from Websites hosted in the historical .yu domain and archived by the Internet Archive between 1997 and 2000, to assess the utility and value of visual data analytics as a measure of nationality of a Web domain. First, we report that only