ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the concurrent development of vaccines offered a rare and somewhat unprecedented opportunity to study antivaccination behavior as it formed over time via the use of archived versions of websites. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess how existing antivaccination websites modified their content to address COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic restrictions. METHODS: Using a preexisting collection of 25 antivaccination websites curated by the IvyPlus Web Collection Program prior to the pandemic and crawled every 6 months via Archive-It, we conducted a content analysis to see how these websites acknowledged or ignored COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic restrictions. Websites were assessed for financial behaviors such as having storefronts, mention of COVID-19 vaccines in general or by manufacturer name, references to personal freedom such as masking, safety concerns like side effects, and skepticism of science. RESULTS: The majority of websites addressed COVID-19 vaccines in a negative fashion, with more websites making appeals to personal freedom or expressing skepticism of science than questioning safety. This can potentially be attributed to the lack of available safety data about the vaccines at the time of data collection. Many of the antivaccination websites we evaluated actively sought donations and had a membership option, evidencing these websites have financial motivations and actively build a community around these issues. The content analysis also offered the opportunity to test the viability of archived websites for use in scholarly research. The archived versions of the websites had significant shortcomings, particularly in search functionality, and required supplementation with the live websites. For web archiving to be a viable source of stand-alone content for research, the technology needs to make significant improvements in its capture abilities. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, we found antivaccination websites existing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic largely adapted their messaging to address COVID-19 vaccines with very few sites ignoring the pandemic altogether. This study also demonstrated the timely and significant need for more robust web archiving capabilities as web-based environments become more ephemeral and unstable.
ABSTRACT
The archived web provides an important footprint of the past, documenting online social behaviour through social media, and news through media outlets websites and government sites. Consequently, web archiving is increasingly gaining attention of heritage institutions, academics and policy makers. The importance of web archives as data resources for (digital) scholars has been acknowledged for investigating the past. Still, heritage institutions and academics struggle to 'keep up to pace' with the fast evolving changes of the World Wide Web and with the changing habits and practices of internet users. While a number of national institutions have set up a national framework to archive 'regular' web pages, social media archiving (SMA) is still in its infancy with various countries starting up pilot archiving projects. SMA is not without challenges; the sheer volume of social media content, the lack of technical standards for capturing or storing social media data and social media's ephemeral character can be impeding factors. The goal of this article is three-fold. First, we aim to extend the most recent descriptive state-of-the-art of national web archiving, published in the first issue of International Journal of Digital Humanities (March 2019) with information on SMA. Secondly, we outline the current legal, technical and operational (such as the selection and preservation policy) aspects of archiving social media content. This is complemented with results from an online survey to which 15 institutions responded. Finally, we discuss and reflect on important challenges in SMA that should be considered in future archiving projects.
ABSTRACT
Em busca de uma solução para compreender as razões pelas quais alguns recursos presentes em websites não são possíveis de serem arquivados pelas ferramentas de captura, surgiu o conceito de arquivabilidade da web. Apresentamos este estudo que propõe iniciar uma discussão acerca do tema, a partir do método CLEAR+ e da ferramenta ArchiveReady, e verificar sua aplicabilidade a partir da identificação de websites da área da saúde, com testes de preservação digital por meio do arquivamento da web. A pesquisa configurou-se como estudo de caso, com procedimentos envolvendo pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, bem como o uso de software para identificar arquivabilidade dos sites. Conclui-se que tanto os testes de arquivabilidade quanto os de arquivamento da web apontam para poucas dificuldades de captura, em pequeno grau, sugerindo-se, portanto, que para atingir uma melhor qualidade de captura sejam adotados padrões de conformidade na produção dos websites, de acordo com o estabelecido pelo World Wide Web Consortium.
In search for a solution to understand the reasons why some resources present on websites are not possible to be archived by capture tools, we approach the concept of web archivability. We present this study that proposes to initiate a discussion about the evaluation of the archivability, using the CLEAR+ method and the ArchiveReady, and to verify their applicability from the identification of websites in the health studies, with digital preservation tests through the web archiving. The research was configured as a case study, with procedures involving bibliographic and documentary research, as well as the use of software to identify the archivability of the sites. It is concluded that both archivability tests and web archiving tests point to little capture difficulties, to a small degree, therefore suggesting that to achieve better capture quality, compliance standards should be adopted in the production of websites, according to what is established by the World Wide Web Consortium.
En la búsqueda de una solución para comprender las razones por las cuales las herramientas de captura no pueden archivar algunos recursos presentes en sitios web, abordamos el concepto de archivabilidad de la web. Presentamos este estudio que propone iniciar una discusión sobre la evaluación de la archivabilidad de los sitios web, utilizando el método CLEAR+ y la herramienta ArchiveReady, y verificar su aplicabilidad a partir de la identificación de sitios web en los estudios de salud, con pruebas de preservación digital a través del archivo web. La investigación se configuró como un estudio de caso, con procedimientos que implican investigación bibliográfica y documental, así como el uso de software para identificar la capacidad de archivo de los sitios. Se concluye que tanto las pruebas de archivabilidad como las pruebas de archivo web apuntan a pequeñas dificultades de captura, en un pequeño grado, lo que sugiere que para lograr una mejor calidad de captura, se deben adoptar estándares de cumplimiento en la producción de sitios web de acuerdo con lo establecido por el World Wide Consorcio Web.
