Date of Award

Spring 5-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

Program/Concentration

Computer Science

Committee Director

Michele C. Weigle

Committee Member

Michael L. Nelson

Committee Member

Faryaneh Poursardar

Abstract

Social media has become one of the primary modes of communication in recent times, with popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram leading the way. Despite its popularity, Instagram has not received as much attention in academic research compared to Facebook and Twitter, and its significant role in contemporary society is often overlooked. Web archives are making efforts to preserve social media content despite the challenges posed by the dynamic nature of these sites. The goal of our research is to facilitate the easy discovery of archived copies, or mementos, of all posts belonging to a specific Instagram account in web archives. We proposed two approaches to support account-based queries for archived Instagram posts. The first approach uses existing technologies in the Internet Archive by using WARC revisit records to incorporate Instagram usernames into the WARC-Target-URI field in the WARC file header. The second approach involves building an external index that maps Instagram user accounts to their posts. The user can query this index to retrieve all post URLs for a particular user, which they can then use to query web archives for each individual post. The implementation of both approaches was demonstrated, and their advantages and disadvantages were discussed. This research will enable web archivists to make informed decisions on which approach to adopt based on practicality and unique requirements for their archives.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/meny-yj96

ISBN

9798379739539

ORCID

0000-0003-4748-9176

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