The Invention and Dissemination of the Spacer Gif: Implications for the Future of Access and Use of Web Archives
Trevor Owens, Grace Thomas · 2019
Libraries, Archives, and Museums are preserving and providing access to archives of nearly two decades of web content. The scale of these collections is both impressive and daunting. These collections of billions of resources and petabytes of data can be challenging to engage with. Given that these “born-digital” archives are already computable as data these digital corpora are a natural fit for the potential of computational scholarship/distant reading. In exploring traces a seemingly trivial, but widespread element in the history of web design; the single pixel GIF, also known as a spacer GIF or the Web Beacon, we illustrate potential for engaging with web archives as data sets. This case study underscores the potential value of using fixity information (cryptographic hashes) in tandem with web archive URLs as a means to explore traces of web design practices evident across multiple web archives. The case study suggests both potential methods for distant reading of web archives for scholarship as well as ways that distant reading methods might used by web archivists to refine web harvesting methods, describe the scope and extent of web archives, and enable new forms of use and access.