thearchivist.funDescriptive transcript
A descriptive transcript combines speech with the visual details needed to understand a video. It can include speaker labels, meaningful actions, on-screen text, and changes that are not explained in the audio. It is esp
A SOURCE-LED INDEX
Explore the archive.
704 records: sourced internet history, research methods and community contributions, followed by the original art project.
Search and filter ↗Digg is sold for a reported half a million dollars
In July 2012 the news site Digg was sold to Betaworks, the company behind Bit.ly and Chartbeat. CNN Money reported that the financial terms were not officially disclosed, with the Wall Street Journal putting the price at
Disaster Girl and the invented backstory
A child's expression beside a training fire became a fictional portrait of chaos.
Discord builds a place to stay together while playing
Discord launched in 2015 around talking with gaming friends, developing into a persistent setting for shared time online.
Discord opens Activities to the broader developer community
Discord announced on 26 September 2024 that Activities were opening to all developers. The move followed the earlier developer preview of its Embedded App SDK. Activities let developers create interactive experiences tha
Distracted Boyfriend turns a photograph into a diagram
Labels converted a stock photograph into a reusable model of divided attention.
DNS distributes the work of naming
RFC 882 described a hierarchical, distributed approach to internet domain names.
Doge turns a look into an inner voice
Kabosu's photograph anchored a playful caption style that outgrew any single image.
DPLA: follow a national network to local collections
The Digital Public Library of America connects digital collections contributed through a network of cultural heritage institutions and regional hubs. Its partner directory is useful for discovering where material actuall
Drakeposting makes preference visible
Two reactions from a music video became a template for rejecting one option and welcoming another.
Duet layouts make collaboration an interface
A video tool gave creators an immediate way to perform beside someone else's contribution.
ENIAC makes electronic computing public
ENIAC made the speed and labor of electronic computation visible to a wider public in 1946.
Ethernet imagines a local community of computers
Bob Metcalfe proposed Ethernet as a way to connect computers at Xerox PARC.
Europeana: connect cultural objects across institutions
Europeana brings together digital cultural heritage from museums, libraries, archives and other institutions across Europe. It is useful for tracing the older visual and material traditions that online culture reuses: po
Event date
An event date is meaningful only after the event has been defined. Prototype creation, announcement, public release, regional availability, and widespread adoption can happen at different times. A record that simply says
ExifTool: inspect metadata while preserving the original
ExifTool is a command-line application and library for reading and writing file metadata. Its official documentation is useful when an image, video or document contains fields that a standard file browser does not expose
Fact Check Explorer: find prior investigations of a claim
Fact Check Explorer helps locate published fact checks, and Google's training explains ways to search for topics, people and publishers. It is useful before repeating an investigation that another organization has alread
Fixity
Fixity checking asks whether stored content still matches an earlier reference. A typical workflow records a digest when accepting a file and compares a new digest later. This can reveal unintended changes, but it requir
Flash Player reaches the end of official support
Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31 December 2020. The company then blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning on 12 January 2021. These were related but separate milestones: the end of support m
Flickr Commons invites the public into photo archives
Flickr and the Library of Congress launched a Commons pilot in January 2008, inviting people to enrich historical photographs with knowledge.
Flickr Commons: recover context around historical photographs
Flickr Commons provides access to photography collections shared by cultural institutions. Its programme also invites public contributions of information and knowledge, making it useful for studying how an image's descri
Flickr makes photography a shared online activity
Flickr entered public release on February 10, 2004, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference.
Frictionless Data: ship a dataset with its meaning
Frictionless Data provides tools and standards for working with data and its metadata. It is useful when an archive needs to share a structured export that someone else can understand without reverse-engineering the orig
Friendster announces it will delete user content and become a game site
On Tuesday, 26 April 2011, CNN Money reported that Friendster would be redesigned to give it a new identity, appearing to position itself as a casual gaming destination. Its traffic and active-user count had almost flatl
Galaxy Brain visualizes escalating absurdity
A sequence of increasingly luminous brains turned rankings into a flexible form of irony.
Gangnam Style makes participation visible
A music video became a global event through viewing, imitation, and shared choreography.
GeoCities is deleted, and volunteers race to copy it
Yahoo closed GeoCities on 26 October 2009. The service had begun in 1994 under the name Beverly Hills Internet. Yahoo stopped new registrations in April 2009 and confirmed the closing date that June. Its FAQ was unusuall
GIF: a format becomes a language
An image format created for constrained connections later became a vocabulary of loops and reactions.
Git makes parallel work part of version control
Git was created in 2005 to support fast, distributed development of the Linux kernel.
Git: preserve the reasoning behind revisions
Git tracks revisions to files and supports collaboration through a recorded history of changes. It is useful for an archive's code, editorial text and structured data when you need to understand what changed and why. The
GitHub makes collaboration around code more visible
GitHub launched publicly on April 10, 2008, with the aim of connecting developers working together through Git.
GNU announces software freedom as a system goal
Richard Stallman announced an effort to build a freely shareable Unix-compatible software system.
Google Code closes, and open-source projects move to other hosts
Google's open source blog announced on 12 March 2015 that Google Code, the project hosting service it had started in 2006, would be shut down. New project creation was disabled the same day. On 24 August 2015 the site we
Google Lens: turn visual clues into research leads
Google Lens provides visual search features that can help identify objects, read visible text and discover related web material. It is useful when you have an image but lack a reliable title, filename or caption. A recog
Google Reader is retired, and its feed history is copied
On 13 March 2013 Google announced that Google Reader would be retired on 1 July. The company said usage of Reader had declined and that it was focusing on fewer products. It pointed users to Google Takeout to export thei
Google retires Picasa for Google Photos
In February 2016 Google announced that it would retire Picasa to focus entirely on a single photo service, Google Photos. PetaPixel reported that the Picasa desktop application would be discontinued from 15 March 2016: i
Google Stadia closes with refunds for hardware and games
Google announced on 29 September 2022 that it would shut down Stadia on 18 January 2023. TechRadar reported that players could keep accessing their game libraries until mid-January, that Google would refund all Stadia ha
Google tells Buzz users it will close in a few weeks
On 14 October 2011 Google announced on its blog that Google Buzz would close in a few weeks. CNN Money described Buzz as 18 months old, launched in February 2010. Google said the closing let it shift its social efforts t
Google Wave goes read-only, then dark
Google's support page on the status of Google Wave sets out two steps. From 31 January 2012 Wave became read-only: users could not create or edit waves, robots that wrote to waves stopped working, and reading existing wa
Google+ shuts for consumers after a privacy review
Google announced in October 2018 that it would close the consumer version of Google+. The company said a review of privacy across its products, called Project Strobe, found a bug in the Google+ People APIs that could hav
Grumpy Cat becomes a public character
A distinctive feline face supplied a ready persona for mock dissatisfaction.
Hampster Dance travels by email
A page of repeated animal animations made forwarding a website the entire joke.
Harlem Shake provides a reusable script
A two-part video structure let different groups perform recognizably the same joke.
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab releases a Data.gov archive
Harvard Law School Library's Innovation Lab announced a Data.gov archive on 6 February 2025. The release described a 16-terabyte collection containing more than 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, with acces
HTML5 records the Web as an application platform
The October 2014 HTML5 Recommendation marked a major milestone for structured, interactive web content.
HTTP/1.0 documents the exchange behind a page
RFC 1945 recorded the request-and-response behavior of HTTP/1.0 in May 1996.
HTTP/3 moves familiar Web semantics onto QUIC
RFC 9114 standardized HTTP/3 in June 2022, mapping HTTP communication onto QUIC.
Imgur announces it will delete old content not tied to an account
In April 2023 Imgur announced new terms of service that would take effect on 15 May 2023. PetaPixel reported that the update would remove old, unused or inactive content not tied to a user account, and would ban nudity,
Instagram builds culture around shared images
Instagram began in 2010; its tenth-anniversary reflection traced how personal sharing, interests, and public culture grew together.
Internet Archive advanced search: locate original media
The Internet Archive advanced search interface helps narrow a large media collection by metadata rather than relying on a broad keyword alone. It is useful for finding manuals, recordings, software-related material and s
Internet Explorer 11 is retired from Windows 10
Microsoft announced on 19 May 2021 that the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application would be retired and go out of support on 15 June 2022 for certain versions of Windows 10. Sean Lyndersay, a Microsoft Edge program man
Internet Society history: read the network’s participants
The Internet Society's brief history offers an account of the Internet's development by people who participated in its formation. It is useful for understanding how technical experiments, research institutions and coordi
Investigate an image beyond its caption
An authentic photograph can support a false story when it is recaptioned, cropped, or moved to another time and place. Image investigation should therefore ask both whether the file was altered and whether the accompanyi
InVID–WeVerify: examine video through selected frames
The InVID–WeVerify verification plugin brings together tools used to investigate online images and video. The project documentation describes features such as extracting video frames and using them in reverse image searc
Itch.io gives independent games their own pages
Itch.io's March 2013 welcome post introduced customizable pages for distributing independent games, with free or paid downloads.
Itch.io lets sellers choose the platform's share
In March 2015, itch.io announced open revenue sharing, allowing sellers to choose the percentage paid to the platform.
JSON
JSON organizes data using objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null. It is common in portable catalogs because many tools can read and write it. A syntactically valid file, however, can still violate an appli
JSON Schema: make an import contract explicit
JSON Schema describes the structure and constraints of JSON data. The official overview explains the relationship between a schema, a data instance and a validator. It is useful for portable archive packs, where contribu
Kappa gives chat a sarcastic face
A small portrait became a shared signal for reading a message with irony.
Keep an archive useful after its launch
An archive remains useful through repeated care, not through a claim that it will last forever. Design a routine that a future maintainer can understand even if the original author is unavailable. The most durable improv