Tutorial: How to browse images from a web archive with Palladio

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Introduction

Web archives contain myriad forms of expression beyond text. You can aggregate their media to enable access more instinctively and intuitively, outside of the search box. This tutorials creates an image gallery that the end user may browse and interact with in order to access and replay the contents of a web archive collection visually.

Used in this tutorial:

• Dataset: Image graph from the Art Galleries web archive collection
• Tools: Palladio
• Time: ~15-20 minutes to complete

Watch

Follow along with a video demonstration of the instructions below:

Instructions

In this section:

1. Get to know your data
2. Create an image gallery
3. Interpret the results

Get to know your data

1. Locate the .image-graph_Baltimore.csv. file in the ARCH workshop archive and open it with your preferred spreadsheet program (Excel, Calc, Numbers, Sheets, etc.). The file includes all of the data derived from the eight seeds in the Art Galleries collection contributed by the Maryland Institute College of Art, covering the city of Baltimore.
   
   
2. Take note of the four attributes included in each Image graph download from ARCH. Each row in the spreadsheet represents the characteristics of an image preserved in the archive:
   1. .crawl_date.: a timestamp representing when each image file was collected.
      
      
   2. .source.: the location of the web page on which the image file appeared when it was collected from the “live” web.
      
      
   3. .url.: the location of the image file when it was collected from the “live” web.
      
      
   4. .alt_text.: the descriptive text that accompanied the image file’s embed markup at the time that both were collected.

Create an image gallery

1. Open Palladio in your preferred web browser here: https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio-app
   
   
2. Drag the CSV file from your local storage into the editor pane at the center of the page.
   
   
3. Confirm that the data from your spreadsheet appears in the editor as comma-separated values (through line 935 in the case of this sample data file) and click the “Load” button:
   
   
   
4. Palladio enables you to represent your data as a map, graph, table, or gallery. For this exercise, let’s select the “Gallery” option in the top navigation bar.
   
   
5. Locate the hamburger menu icon (≡) at the top-right corner of the screen and click on it to expand your gallery’s settings. Configure the gallery’s dimensions to match the following attributes from your data:
   1. Click on the .Title. box and select the .crawl_date. option from the ensuing dialog.
      
      
   2. Set the .Text. field to .alt_text..
      
      
   3. Set .Link. to .source..
      
      
   4. Set .Image URL. to .url.. The images should begin to load in the grid on the page:
      
      
      
      
6. Click on a sample image or two in the grid to see them render in their original context. Where do they take you?

Interpret the results

1. Now let’s sort and filter our collection in order to find the artists or works that interest us.
   1. Set the .Sort by. value to .source.. This re-organizes the images into the alphabetical order of the pages on which we can find them, by those pages’ URLs.
      
      
   2. Scroll down until you come to the first example of a video installation. Who is the artist? What is the title of the work, where did it exhibit, and when? 
      
      
   3. Click on the “Facet” button at the bottom-left corner of the screen to filter your view by one of the dimensions you’ve set from the dataset. In the .Description. field, name this view “Artists.”
      
      
   4. Set the .Dimensions. value at the right side of the screen to .alt_text. in order to filter your current view by the content of the embedded images’ alt text tags.
      
      
   5. Find the .alt_text. values at the bottom-left corner of the screen, listed in descending order of frequency. What artist’s name appears most frequently? Click on it to filter your view to show only their work.
      
      
   6. Re-organize your values alphabetically by clicking on the “↓AZ” button at the top-right corner of the table. Scroll through the results until you find works by Marisa Takal. When were they exhibited? Which other artists were part of this show?