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Hi all, Digital conservator Dragan Espenschied and the crew at Rhizome, one of the leading platforms for new media art, have created a tool for archiving social media such as Instagram and Facebook. Rhizome's novel application enables archivists to act as "human spiders" (my term) to mouse around a Web page and capture HTTP requests and responses in real time. Called Colloq, it's a bit like surfing the Web while wearing a GoPro helmet, but the result is interactive HTML rather than a video capture. The resulting WARC files can be reconstituted into interactive pages for future users. This tool is necessary because more and more of these stream-based sites don't have static HTML that you can download to disk. Instagram, for example, is constructed on the fly from JavaScript calls that fill out parts of the page as they are explored by their users. (You've experienced this effect if you've scrolled to what you thought was the bottom of a Web page only to have the page add more content "below the fold.") Because it's not completely automated, Colloq is not the sort of thing an organization like the Internet Archive could rely on, but it could be helpful for a collecting institution with a narrower mission or via crowdsourcing. There's more information in this article from yesterday's New York Times: A Dynamic New Tool to Preserve the Friendsters of the Future - NYTimes.com http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/a-new-tool-to-preserve-moments-on-the-internet jon ______________________________ Jon Ippolito Professor of New Media Co-director, Still Water Director, Digital Curation graduate program The University of Maine 406 Chadbourne Orono, ME 04469-5713 http://still-water.net Tel: 207 581-4477 Fax: 207 581-4357 Twitter: @jonippolito