Original Research Article Big Data & Society July–December 2015: 1–15 ! The Author(s) 2015 Big Web data, small focus: An Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav ethnosemiotic approach to culturally DOI: 10.1177/2053951715595823 themed selective Web archiving bds.sagepub.com Saskia Huc-Hepher Abstract This paper proposes a multimodal ethnosemiotic conceptual framework for culturally themed selective Web archiving, taking as a practical example the curation of the London French Special Collection (LFSC) in the UK Web Archive. Its focus on a particular ‘community’ is presented as advantageous in overcoming the sheer scale of data available on the Web; yet, it is argued that these ethnographic boundaries may be flawed if they do not map onto the collective self- perception of the London French. The approach establishes several theoretical meeting points between Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography and Gunther Kress’s multimodal social semiotics, notably, the foregrounding of practice and the meaning-making potentialities of the everyday; the implications of language and categorisation; the interplay between (curating/researcher) subject and (curated/research) object; evolving notions of agency, authorship and audience; together with social engagement, and the archive as dynamic process and product. The curation rationale proposed stems from Bourdieu’s three-stage field analysis model, which places a strong emphasis on habitus, considered to be most accurately (re)presented through blogs, yet necessitates its contextualisation within the broader (diasporic) field(s), through institutional websites, for example, whilst advocating a reflexive awareness of the researcher/curator’s (sub- jective) role. This, alongside the Kressian acknowledgement of the inherent multimodality of on-line resources, lends itself convincingly to selection and valuation strategies, whilst the discussion of language, genre, authorship and audience is relevant to the potential cataloguing of Web objects. By conceptualising the culturally themed selective Web-archiving process within the ethnosemiotic framework constructed, concrete recommendations emerge regarding curation, clas- sification and crowd-sourcing. Keywords Selective Web archiving, Bourdieu, Kress, multimodality, ethnosemiotics, curation Introduction: The practice and the current and future generations (Digital Preservation theory Coalition, n. d.; Kitchin, 2014: 30; Pennock, 2007: 1). As distinct from a digital archive per se, which Through a combination of Bourdieusian ethnographic preserves digitised copies of physical collections or and Kressian semiotic principles, this article proposes a born-digital documents never available in ‘hard’ form, conceptual framework for the construction of a small a Web archive collects only ‘material’ found on the corpus of thematically linked Internet objects within a big Web archive. The fundamental purpose of a Web Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Social archive is to retain a version of the fragile (Strodl et al., Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster, UK 2011: 8; Taylor, 2012: 2) and ephemeral (Day, 2006: 178; Gomes and Costa, 2014: 107; Masane` s, 2006: 6) Corresponding author: Saskia Huc-Hepher, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, digital material found on the Internet for posterity, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster, thereby providing a lasting record of Web objects 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW, UK. deemed to be of intellectual and cultural value to Email: [email protected] Creative Commons CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (http://www.uk. sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm). Downloaded from by guest on December 22, 2015 2 Big Data & Society ‘immaterial’ Internet, regularly safeguarding it from material that demonstrates the everyday existence of future obsolescence as the on-line landscape evolves. the London French in the spatial and temporal context In this sense, a Web archive, or collection therein, is of the here and now; as archival product: ensuring that not so much a record of born-digital data, and by no the archived collection serves the social purpose of means an ‘identical copy’ (Bru¨gger, 2014: 20) of the (re)presenting and preserving the multifaceted aspects Internet, rather it is a reproduction, a created entity of this community, from the institutional to the indi- composed of digital material reborn and brought vidual, through a variety of genres, discourses and together in a technically and ontologically more modes, on a platform which is socially committed restricted environment than in its original dynamic through its open accessibility (Kitchin, 2014: 55); and network. as analytical object: drawing on notions of field theory, Cognisant of the inherent limitations of Web arch- reflexivity, objectivation and multimodality, the ethno- ives in relation to the live Web (Pennock, 2013: 5; semiotic approach, integrated within a broader ethnog- Spaniol et al., 2009) and with concerns over their raphy of the French community in London, finds its long-term usefulness, or at least usability, as vast wider justification and use as a case-study here. repositories of unwieldy Big Data,1 this article ascribes Constructing the Collection is one facet of an several ‘ethnosemiotic’ principles to the practice of cur- overarching doctoral project that seeks to reveal the ating a smaller, thematically selected Web collection, everyday experiences and attitudes of a demographic- which may arguably be a more manageable set of ally diverse sample of London’s French migrants, as materials for present and future end-users (Brown, recounted first-hand through a series of semi-structured 2006: 32), as well as drawing attention to some of the interviews, focus groups3 and a paper survey, as well as problematics concerned, all the while from an ‘ethno- through other traditional ethnographic methods, such semiotic’ perspective. The collection under scrutiny is as participant observation and note-taking within effectively an archive within an archive: for a Web arch- London-French circles, and less traditional ones, ive refers to a vast agglomeration of resources including the social-semiotic analysis, or ‘deconstruc- harvested automatically from the entire World Wide tion’, to adopt Kitchin’s terminology (2014: 190), of Web (as with the US Internet Archive) or an entire community Web objects. To that end, in 2011, work national domain (as with the UK Web Archive or the began to appraise and collect Web material, or that Danish Net Archive; Jacobsen, 2008), whereas the which could be broken down into ‘Web elements’, ‘micro’ archive (Bru¨gger, 2005: 10) under discussion is ‘Web pages’ and ‘Web sites’ from the London-French a targeted corpus of websites selected for their thematic ‘Web sphere’ (according to the five-tiered conceptual- coherence, presenting users with a clear pathway isation of the Web developed by Bru¨gger, 2014: 5) through the mass of ‘messy’ (Kitchin, 2014: 160; to build a corpus of resources for the LFSC. Each Mayer-Scho¨nberger and Cukier, 2013: 12) data Web entity was selected from the live World Wide contained in the colossal, and ever-expanding, national Web, irrespective of domain (despite the standard UK UK Web Archive. Further, just as the collection of TLD – Top Level Domain – scope of the UK Web Web objects discussed here offers a defined, and neces- Archive, since excluding <.com> and <.fr> domains, sarily small, route into the big data that arguably for instance, would have precluded a significant number constitute Web archives, so the ethnosemiotic approach of thematically relevant sites and pages) and was cap- posited, which draws on the points of convergence tured with the Web Curator Tool, which, like the between Bourdieusian and Kressian conceptualisations majority of other tools, uses the Heritrix Web crawler, of ethnography and semiotics respectively, aims to offer developed by the Internet Archive. In an effort to a fine-grained theoretical route into the curation achieve consistency with the theoretical framework of exercise. the overarching project and to reflect the community as The example taken is the London French fully as possible – in keeping with the BL remit – the Special Collection (LFSC),2 housed within the UK curation, construction and analysis stages were Web Archive, which has been harvesting websites approached from a multimodal ethnosemiotic angle. from the UK domain since 2004 and is itself hosted Although rarely united in a single investigative or by the British Library. The Collection responds directly analytical undertaking, with some notable exceptions to the UK Web Archive’s key mission to ‘reflect the (Bezemer et al., 2013; Dicks et al., 2006; Vannini, diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout 2007), ethnographic and social-semiotic schools of the UK’ (Pennock, 2013: 26) in its (re)presentation of thought share much common ground, such as agency one of London’s most significant, yet comparatively and interest; habitus, practice and the insights of the invisible, minority communities: the French. In com- imperceptible; the tyranny of language; dynamics and bining