The Descriptor project is a subset of WALK with the goal of describing the partnership's collective resources, providing some pathfinders to help the historians of the future interpret what is (and is not) going on in the data. This includes two main methods.
The goal of this section is to describe the collection in a more detailed way than previously. The reality is that many of the collections include vast amounts of data on a broad topic that includes resources that have gained and lost prominence over time. Further, sometimes a technical issue results in the loss of data that may influence analysis.
Social network analysis is a familiar way that researchers try to uncover trends in the dynamics of a web-system. Unfortunately, the networks for Web Archives can be so large as to limit the ability for valid interpretation of the data. We are going to attempt to provide some guidance using common filters and visualisation techniques to highlight some of the most important aspects of the networks.
In addition to the analysis of the datasets, we are also looking to build methods for analyzing WARCbase outputs, that can later be included in the walk-compare tool, which currently focusses on bivariate rather than univariate analysis of networks..