Libraries, Archives & Databases 2011

Archiving the Interwebs: A Look at 4chanarchive
A tumblr by Darrell McIndoe

Excerpt: <<Because of the impermanent nature of 4chan’s content the users took it upon themselves to archive those threads which they believe will be worth returning to at some point in the future. The culture of 4chan is permeated with talk of “epic posts” and “gets” (“4chan”), the former is any post which is seen to be extraordinarily funny or relevant, the latter is when a thread or post in a thread receives a certain ordered number, as all posts in all boards have their number clearly displayed in the upper-right corner. It’s not difficult to see how devotees of the board would be disappointed in missing an important post, possibly the genesis of the next lolcats or rickroll. The 4chanarchive is an attempt to capture these conversations in a snapshot that can be experienced in less than real-time.>>

§ One Response to Archiving the Interwebs: A Look at 4chanarchive

• rory solomon says:

  May 25, 2011 at 11:25 pm

  thought you guys may enjoy this:

  MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and University of Southampton researchers recently wrote a paper analyzing 4Chan’s “alternative credibility mechanisms” and particular community activity. Collecting a dataset over two weeks the study considers the speed of activity on the site and user habits like having “/b/ folders” archiving material from the site and unicode fluency as a status indicator.

  4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community, by JOANNE MCNEIL for http://rhizome.org, Wednesday May 25th, 2011

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