2012-07-05: Web Crawler Animation
In this post I'm revisiting a publication from the pre-blog era that has really cool animations. Most of my work is at the protocol and architecture level (e.g., PMH , ORE , Memento , ResourceSync ) and while I enjoy that, it does leave me with a serious case of visualization envy that was made worse by attending a Tufte lecture ca. 2004. While we don't have anything close to Minard's " Napoleon's March to Moscow ", we do have a couple of things of which I'm especially proud. One of things I find myself showing to people every month or two are Joan Smith 's animations of web crawlers visiting a series of synthetic web sites over the course of a year (February 2007 -- February 2008). Joan's dissertation was on the topic of web servers assisting the task of digital preservation, both by enumerating the valid URIs at a web site and by providing preservation metadata about the resource representations at the web site. One of the sub-question...