Collaborators
Dr. Andrea Kocsis
National Library of Scotland
Product
Art exhibition
Interactive Data vis
Services
Art Direction
Design & Development Exhibition Design
Year
2025
This data-driven exhibition allows audiences to explore and interact with web archive data.
Unlike linear historical records, websites emerge, evolve, and vanish – leaving only traces, ghosts, or shadows of their existence. Web archives collect snapshots of websites, ensuring that our digital heritage remains accessible to future generations. However, due to the internet’s inherently dynamic nature – where content is continuously updated, replaced, or removed – substantial gaps exist in the web archive collections.
Rather than viewing this missingness as an error, this project sought to understood it as a meaningful part of the data story, one that calls for visual and interactive strategies that highlight digital loss.
Browse the visualizations:
Centrepiece commission where Dorsey Kaufmann experiments with physicalizing web archive data through UV projection onto cyanotype
Geospatial visualization where Parker Kaufmann explores web archive data by location
Through interactive visualizations, the exhibition explores the complexities of missing and incomplete data, confronting the inherent imperfection of web archives and the ephemerality of web content.
Three of the works were first created by Informatics MSc students Mansi Manoj, Qianhui Meng, and Shuyu Zhang under the supervision of Dorsey Kaufmann.