Social cards probably provide for better understanding of web archive collections

Abstract

Used by a variety of researchers, web archive collections have become invaluable sources of evidence. If a researcher is presented with a web archive collection that they did not create, how do they know what is inside so that they can use it for their own research? Search engine results and social media links are represented as surrogates, small easily digestible summaries of the underlying page. Search engines and social media have a different focus, and hence produce different surrogates than web archives. Search engine surrogates help a user answer the question “Will this link meet my information need?” Social media surrogates help a user decide “Should I click on this?” Our use case is subtly different. We hypothesize that groups of surrogates together are useful for summarizing a collection. We want to help users answer the question of “What does the underlying collection contain?” But which surrogate should we use? With Mechanical Turk participants, we evaluate six different surrogate types against each other. We find that the type of surrogate does not influence the time to complete the task we presented the participants. Of particular interest are social cards, surrogates typically found on social media, and browser thumbnails, screen captures of web pages rendered in a browser. At p = 0.0569, and p = 0.0770, respectively, we find that social cards and social cards paired side-by-side with browser thumbnails probably provide better collection understanding than the surrogates currently used by the popular Archive-It web archiving platform. We measure user interactions with each surrogate and find that users interact with social cards less than other types. The results of this study have implications for our web archive summarization work, live web curation platforms, social media, and more.