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Mapping the UK webspace: fifteen years of british universities on the web

Published: 23 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper maps the national UK web presence on the basis of an analysis of the .uk domain from 1996 to 2010. It reviews previous attempts to use web archives to understand national web domains and describes the dataset. Next, it presents an analysis of the .uk domain, including the overall number of links in the archive and changes in the link density of different second-level domains over time. We then explore changes over time within a particular second-level domain, the academic subdomain .ac.uk, and compare linking practices with variables, including institutional affiliation, league table ranking, and geographic location. We do not detect institutional affiliation affecting linking practices and find only partial evidence of league table ranking affecting network centrality, but find a clear inverse relationship between the density of links and the geographical distance between universities. This echoes prior findings regarding offline academic activity, which allows us to argue that real-world factors like geography continue to shape academic relationships even in the Internet age. We conclude with directions for future uses of web archive resources in this emerging area of research.

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  • (2023) Continuity and discontinuity in web archives: a multi-level reconstruction of the firsttuesday community through persistences, continuity spaces and web cernes Internet Histories10.1080/24701475.2023.22540507:4(354-385)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Modeling clusters from the ground up: A web data approachEnvironment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science10.1177/2399808322110818550:1(244-267)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Using the Web to Predict Regional Trade Flows: Data Extraction, Modeling, and ValidationAnnals of the American Association of Geographers10.1080/24694452.2022.2109577113:3(717-739)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science
June 2014
318 pages
ISBN:9781450326223
DOI:10.1145/2615569
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 June 2014

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Author Tags

  1. academic web
  2. big data
  3. hyperlink analysis
  4. network analysis
  5. web archives
  6. world wide web

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for the "Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities (BUDDAH)"

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WebSci '14
Sponsor:
WebSci '14: ACM Web Science Conference
June 23 - 26, 2014
Indiana, Bloomington, USA

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WebSci '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 144 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Websci '25
17th ACM Web Science Conference
May 20 - 24, 2025
New Brunswick , NJ , USA

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023) Continuity and discontinuity in web archives: a multi-level reconstruction of the firsttuesday community through persistences, continuity spaces and web cernes Internet Histories10.1080/24701475.2023.22540507:4(354-385)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Modeling clusters from the ground up: A web data approachEnvironment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science10.1177/2399808322110818550:1(244-267)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Using the Web to Predict Regional Trade Flows: Data Extraction, Modeling, and ValidationAnnals of the American Association of Geographers10.1080/24694452.2022.2109577113:3(717-739)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2022
  • (2021)A Holistic View on Web ArchivesThe Past Web10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_8(85-99)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Individual internet usage and the availability of online content of local interest: A multilevel approachComputers, Environment and Urban Systems10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2019.10137179(101371)Online publication date: Jan-2020
  • (2019)A Global Approach to the Spatial Diversity and Dynamics of Internet DomainsGeographical Review10.1111/j.1931-0846.2016.12197.x106:4(567-587)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2019
  • (2019)Historical Web as a Tool for Analyzing Social ChangeSecond International Handbook of Internet Research10.1007/978-94-024-1555-1_24(489-504)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2019
  • (2018)How digital design shapes political participation: A natural experiment with social informationPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.019606813:4(e0196068)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Mailing list archives as useful primary sources for historians: looking for flame warsInternet Histories10.1080/24701475.2018.14567412:1-2(38-54)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2018
  • (2018)The colors of the national WebInternational Journal on Digital Libraries10.1007/s00799-016-0202-619:1(95-106)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2018
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