What is it that we are actually mapping out here? That is, where are we seeing the history and spread of these files and where are we seeing the history of decisions about what is crawled and how those crawls are scoped? To that end, the note Andy sent me after doing the check is important context. The Shape of the Trend, The Shape of history and the Scope of the Crawl If we were to zero in on that early year we could well pinpoint the URL that each of these images first appeared at in the archive and they day they first appeared. They were all there, for the most part at the beginning, so what circumstances led one to appear so often and the others not? Why do they all but disappear from the archive in 19? Which opens the question of when and how they made their ways across the web. Which makes sense based on where they come from in Olia’s research. Interestingly, each one of these exists in the UK webarchive by 1997. At the same time, why do most of the other transparent GIFs all but disappear in 2008?What do we make of the resurgence of blank.gif in 2010? What is up with the massive spike of pixel.gif in 2004? In 2008 more than a million instances of that GIF appear in the UK Web archive. I’m curious what folks think we learn from this? The trends over time (pictured below) are interesting in their own right. So, there is at least in terms of what the UK Web archive collected, spaceball.gif was the early break out hit. These include 2 instances of Blank.gif, 3 instances of pixel.gif and 46 instances of spaceball.gif. With that said, we can see the scale at which these GIFS appear around the UK web.įrom the data we learn of three extant examples of GIFs in the archive dating from 1996. It’s likely that we are seeing a lot of the underlying crawl dynamics here as much as we are seeing trends in the history of the GIFs. One of them, cleardot.gif, appears in the UK web archive over a million times! He published the data and the scripts to visualize it online. So, the two geocities files there predate their crawl of google’s first clear.gif.Īndy Jackson from the British Library was generous enough to take a look for these SHA values in the UK Web archive. Interestingly we can also see which of these has been present and associated with the provided URLs the longest in the Internet Archive. The result is to see that there aren’t really 10 different files here, instead three of these GIFs are identical. I’ve colored in the hashes that are the same as each other. (It is also possible that they were generated through exactly the same process, but I imagine that is unlikely.) I’ve got a picture of it below, but here is a link to the spreadsheet. gifs that Olia shared in her online exhibition to see the extent to which some of them are actually the same original file with different names. So I generated SHA-1 hashes for all of the. In an effort to get outside screen essentialism I’ve been a bit smitten with the idea of looking at things like cryptographic hashes to show how two things that look the same are, at a lower level, not the same. I remember, everybody who made pages in the 90s had cgif, maybe it was called clear gif, some people would call it zero-dot-gif, but it was this transparent one that would help you to make layouts, and now we can say that this, we found, we can maybe try to build now something out of this invisible gif, just implement it in our work, whatever it is, and make it in our own pages, this to prolong the life of Geocities. Here is how Olia explained their role in an interview: As a result, the broken image symbol is the thing that alerts us to the presence of the one’s that are still alive and out there. They are all hot linked from their original URLs. Here is a picture of a n exhibition Olia mounted of various historically significant transparent GIFs. These invisible files have a story to tell, and I think exploring there presence and traces in web archives can end up illustrating some ideas for modes of researching in web archives. Digital folklorist, Olia Lialina has done some great work exploring the presence of spacer GIFs in the Geocities web archive and on how those GIFs persisted in some cases beyond the deletion of geocities. Tiny transparent image files have played a significant role in the history of the Web.
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