Playing at Web Archiving

A few months ago, a colleague suggested that we should come up with ways of helping people learn about the main stages of web archiving, and to help them understand some of the more common technical terminology.

I got a bit carried away…

…because at the same time, I’d been hearing a lot about Twine and about the interactive fiction that people can build using it. So, I thought, why not use a interactive fiction engine to built a ‘web archiving simulator’ that takes you through the core web archiving life-cycle? A way to ’learn by doing’ without having all the baggage involved in doing it for real?

Well, because it’ll suck up a tonne of time learning about Twine and twinery.org and the two different versions and fiddling about with the structure and with the prose…

After a few evenings I ran out of steam, and the experiment has been sitting in browser tab since then, unfinished.

I enjoyed building it, but it’s really not going to get finished any time soon. I’m not even sure what ‘finished’ would look like any more. So I may as well publish it as it is. If you want to play the game of web archiving, click the link below…

I’ve also made the source export available, which you should be able to upload at twinery.org if you want to extend it or just see how it works.

Let me know what you think!

Anj