December 15, 2008, 1:56 pm
Manipulating the Historical Web
by Lisa Agustin
Filed under: Current Events, Technology, Web Interface Design
You may be familiar with the Internet Archive (a.k.a. the WayBackMachine), an Internet library of 85 billion web pages that lets you search for a specific web site (including ones that are now defunct) to see how it looked on a given date in the past. But while these historical views are interesting, their usefulness is limited since they only provide single, unconnected snapshots frozen in time. Enter the Zoetrope web crawler, a system created by Advanced Technologies Lab at Adobe Systems. With Zoetrope, users will be able to manipulate earlier versions of the web and generate visualizations of web data over time. “Time lenses” can be used in different regions of a page, to see specifically how data in that section has changed over a specific period of time. These lenses can even be combined to see the interrelation of data sets, enabling the user to explore cause-and-effect hypotheses (see the Zoetrope demo for an example of this). Intended for the “casual researcher,” it’s easy to see how data junkies could spend hours with this application. Zoetrope’s creators expect to release the application for free next summer.
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