The Web Ecology Project is dedicated to the preservation of digital culture and folklore. In a recent talk about the Archive Team, Jason Scott elucidated the usual strategy that companies employ for dealing with digital artifacts, platforms, and communities:

Disenfranchise. Cut off any amount of support or awareness by users of their environment and what they are putting their lives into.

Demean. When a site falls out of favor, act like it’s an electronic ghetto, not worth consideration as a valid entity. Think Friendster, orkut, myspace, geocities and a dozen others. Say their name in the company of people who understand the technical issues, and they snort. For a lot of people, these sites are parties, and the party is over.

Delete. Give a random amount of warning, and I mean, it really is completely arbitrary and made up, and then delete, with no recourse, nobody to ask for a copy, nobody to contact to retrieve your lost data, your husband’s history, your child’s photos. I’ve seen periods as long as a year and as short as 48 hours. There’s nothing, no standardization, no agreed upon procedure for decommissioning these sites. It’s all just being made up as it goes along.

Recently, Encyclopediae Dramatica (ED) — a wiki dedicated to the archiving of -chan subculture, celebrity, and the lulz — was removed from its servers with no effort to preserve the information contained within. While it has been replaced with a new wiki, we at the Web Ecology Project remain disheartened that no opportunity for the preservation of ED was offered nor any warning given.

Luckily, during a recent Web Ecology Camp in mid-February 2011, researchers Seth Woodworth and Alex Leavitt — during a scoping session for a project on Anonymous and Operation Payback — scraped ED and downloaded the textual elements of the wiki. We currently possess .txt files detailing the wiki markup used in the 9401 pages of ED (total at the time of collection), including links and records of images (though we do not possess the actual image files; we also do not have the edit histories, discussion pages, or user pages).

Taking a cue from Archive Team, “we are going to rescue your shit.” For the betterment of culture and research, you can find a link to a .zip that contains all 9401 .txt files, the archive of Encyclopediae Dramatica, below.

http://webecology.net/ED_archive.zip

by Devin Gaffney & Ian Pearce

with Matt Morain and Alex Leavitt

Recently, two of our Web Ecologists (Ian Pearce and Devin Gaffney) followed up on an interesting data set that was uploaded by Sean McColgan, a digital strategist based out of London. The Web Eco team also extracted another data set from Twapper Keeper using an experimental-stage data set uploader, and came up with interesting results as to the efficacy of the ad campaign, which, in a few conversations between some Web Ecologists, clearly marked one of the first widely successful viral marketing campaigns conducted by any agency ever.

The full 20-page report covers a basic approach that 140kit employs in doing large-scale hands on research: First, a quick data-sheet or executive summary, and then some more in-depth research. The data is approached from the perspectives of general (basic, pre-established important points of interest), content (what is actually said), and network (the connections and relationships between users) analysis, which allows for a clear review of data that gives a sense of the dynamics of the data set instead of simple numbers and figures that only give glimpses of the information.

140kit’s analysis kit was expanded and optimized in order to learn about the user base: in particular, we were able to query True Knowledge’s incredible system to find out about the genders of the users:

Gender Breakdowns, Old Spice Dataset: 34.91% Male, 24.55% Female, 40.52% Inconclusive

One of the core basic histogram charts available in any 140kit data set is the accounts created over time:

Account creation dates for “Old Spice" Data Set, 23,924 Users

And one of the more interesting pieces of information is the network analysis that we conduct. One of the most basic problems with other internal reports Web Ecology has seen from marketing analysis firms is that they frequently omit network analysis in analyzing data that is of a fundamentally networked nature:

Re-Tweet Network Map, with small-node pruning enabled alongside logarithmic node sizing based on out-degrees

Finally, here’s a link to that Youtube video, just in case you were in a bunker all summer and didn’t see the genius of W+K’s creative department:

Simulating human identities online with robots is hard. So why not just pay humans to do it for you?

Pawnfarm, made in a collaboration between Web Ecology Project researchers Evan Burchard and Tim Hwang (and emerging from the various discussions at Web Ecology Camp IV) enables you to do just that. Once you have an instance of it running, you can put any arbitrary number of Twitter accounts under zombie control of the artificial artificial intelligence engine of Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Then, you can tell the bots to have human-generated @’s, RTs, tweets, and specify custom directions for them to follow (tweet about the weather, comment on articles, etc), just by pumping money into Mechanical Turk. It’s pretty slick.

Effectively, this creates a human-powered botnet completely under the command of the user of Pawnfarm. It’s hoped that this project will allow for the massive scaling of human-powered robo-identities on Twitter, and other interesting experiments coming out of it. The next steps, for the curious, are to allow the behavior of these bots to get proactive, having them follow/unfollow under certain conditions, reply to certain parts of a social network, etc, etc. Truly exciting times.

All the code now released over Github on the MIT License. Get it while it’s hot! And, send any questions/thoughts/etc to contact@webecologyproject.org.

by Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang

with Patrick Davison, Mike Edwards, Devin Gaffney, Sam Gilbert, Erhardt Graeff, Jennifer Jacobs, Dan Luxemburg, Kunal Patel, Mike Rugnetta, & Karina van Schaardenburg

This paper represents an initial study of ChatRoulette.com, conducted between February 6th and 7th, 2010 by researchers in attendance at Web Ecology Camp III in Brooklyn, NY. We sampled 201 ChatRoulette sessions, noting characteristics such as group size and gender. We also conducted 30 brief interviews with users to inquire about their age, location, and frequency of ChatRoulette use.

Summary

• ChatRoulette represents an example of a probabilistic community: a community shaped by a platform which mediates the encounters between its users by eliminating lasting connections between them.

• After ChatRoulette users become more acquainted with the system (ie., do not browse solely to explore), we predict a decrease in explicit content, an increase in the consolidation of content genres, and an increase in the formation of celebrity figures.

• Our survey shows that ChatRoulette’s current community continues to consist of males age 18-24, concurrent with Alexa data.

You can download our report here.