Week Two: The Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is a way to view archived websites from a specific point in time and is extremely useful when conducting research. Since the Internet is a constantly evolving medium of information, it is often helpful to have the ability to go back in time and view websites, articles, or other information that is no longer readily available on the Internet as we currently know it. I believe historians and the field of digital history would find this to be exceptionally useful because the Wayback Machine helps preserve and modernize old historical documents and it also makes this information easily accessible to most people. While digital history is a relatively new field, the Wayback Machine contains documents dating as far back as 1996. In total, it preserves 435 billion pages of information and this number continues to grow every day.

      Aside from its primary purpose, which is preserving web content, the Wayback Machine also has a special collection feature that shows how the web reacted to various important historical events, such as September 11, 2001. This feature is notably helpful when conducting research as it can be used to determine which sources were reporting on specific historical events, allows researchers to navigate to these specific pages, and even includes the dates the original websites are archived from. The Wayback Machine also allows researchers to study the way in which popular websites on the Internet have evolved over time. For example, the Wayback Machine contains 50,723 archived snapshots of Google.com dating back to November 11, 1998 where users can see the search engine in its earliest days. For those that are interested, a subscription service is available for the Wayback Machine, which allows individuals (particularly digital historians who would be interested in such features) to automatically preserve their work so that it may be easily accessed in the future. It also allows users to upload their work for free manually using the “save page now” feature. This is a feature I would like to use for the major project in Hist*4170 Exploring Digital Humanities, as it will preserve my project and allow others to access it at any time.  

      Finally, the Wayback Machine contains some useful tools that assist people in maintaining their research/content. For example, those using Wordpress to manage and publish their research can take advantage of the broken link checker tool. This tool will scan your content and notify you of any broken hyperlinks or images. This helps your research be more complete and credible. Also, for the more advanced users that plan to host their own content instead of using a 3rd party such as WordPress, there's a handy 404 handler tool that helps end users get to where they're going. It works by providing the user with a Wayback archived version of a page should they encounter a 404 error. Overall, the Wayback Machine is a useful application readily available to the public with an exceptionally valuable use for historians in the digital age.

Link to the Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/