Archiving Interactive Narrative: Technical Report (1.3)

Abstract

• Tools used were W3ACT and Webrecorder. W3ACT, or ACT, the Annotation Curation Tool is Open Source software designed by The British Library to help librarians, curators and subject specialists curate specific parts of the Web. It interfaces with the Heritrix crawl engine built by the Internet Archive. Both ACT and the Heritrix crawl engine are state of the art web archiving tools, however they are more geared towards crawling the web at scale rather than in high fidelity. Rhizome’s Webrecorder instead focusses on dynamic content, such as “embedded video and complex javascript”. Webrecorder’s capturing tool hosts collections of works online which can also be downloaded as what Webrecorder describes as WARC files, although it should be noted that they are actually WARC.GZ. Webrecorder is also able to emulate older browsers, allowing capture of works which use older versions of javascript and flash. In order to get the best captures from Webrecorder, pre-planning is necessary, with an initial exploration of the work to determine how much needs to be captured, and to determine the best route to take through the work in the event that capturing in its entirety would prove too time-consuming.