Digital Ghosts - Visualising Scotland's Web Archives
Dr Andrea Kocsis, Parker Kaufmann, Miriam Walsh, Mansi Manoj, Qianhui Meng, Shuyu Zhang, Peter Bently, Mark Kobine, Evan Morgan
 |
 |
 |
Digital Ghosts is a practice-based research project with a huge impact and an even bigger heart. Centred on a public exhibition at Inspace Gallery, Edinburgh, it used creative visualisations and data-physicalisation artworks built from the Scotland on the Internet collection of the UK Web Archive, curated at the National Library of Scotland, to engage non-specialist audiences with web preservation. The project asked how visualising messy, fragmented GLAM metadata can communicate the scale of web decay, and how this creative approach can facilitate the use of web archives by exposing the heroic web preservation efforts.
The project adopted a research-through-design framework, combining metadata enrichment with exploratory visualisation, followed by iterative user evaluation. It’s based on a dataset of the metadata of over 87,000 hand-curated records from the National Library of Scotland’s Scotland on the Internet collection, acquired during the National Librarians Fellowship in Digital Scholarship. Crucially, the methodology incorporated interdisciplinary collaboration as we brought together archivists, data scientists, visualisation artists, developers, students, and audiences to find a common language through the web data. The team worked across three stages: data wrangling and enrichment; prototyping and implementation with various visualisation, physicalisation, and interaction tools (motion tracking, p5/D3, TouchDesigner, cyanotype); and evaluation through pre-exhibition user testing, interviews, and exhibition visitor surveys.
This approach is particularly apt for GLAM data, where meaning is shaped much by context, infrastructure, technical skills, and curation. Visitor surveys (n=94) show a marked shift in understanding: before attending, 62% of participants reported little to no knowledge of web decay, while 80% stated that the exhibition mostly or completely changed how they think about digital loss and online presence. Awareness of web archives also increased: 30% of visitors had never encountered web archives before, yet afterwards reported a clear understanding of their function and a greater likelihood of using them. Qualitative responses further emphasised the effectiveness of the approach, with participants describing the works as “engaging” and “emotive”, and noting that the visualisations made an otherwise invisible process tangible, helping them grasp the “form” and “shape” of online disappearance.
Creativity and innovation played a central factor in these results. The creative processes transformed metadata into sensory and temporal experiences, allowing audiences to “feel” decay rather than simply observe it, resulting in five distinct artworks, including data physicalisation, interactive visualisations, and geospatial mapping, to render absence perceptible.
The commissioned centrepiece, by Dorsey Kaufman, showed that what’s preserved as an online record is actually just a ghost of our real, physical life. And what’s left over from it is only the skeleton of that reality. In this work, we projected an animation of the appearance, cataloguing in UKWA, and disappearance of links related to four topics (Climate Change, Civil Rights, Covid, and Brexit) onto a cyanotype medium over the first week of the exhibition. In the second week, we revealed the imprint it left behind, so visitors could experience the temporality and unevenness of the transition between the physical and the digital.
Life and Death of Music, the visitors’ favourite, was a very emotive piece which highlighted the scale of online decay in music collections. Sites: Surfaced or Submerged enabled the visitor to walk in the curator's mind to see which topics he collected each month, and, through embodied interaction, it revealed that even with the most systematic approach, it’s almost impossible to escape archival bias. Pandemic in the Archives, about COVID-19 information, demonstrated that during a crisis, links change so quickly that, without extremely frequent archiving, important discourse disappears from our future archives. So the real enemy is not the link rot, but the sly content change. And finally, Digital Coordinates revealed the web's geographical bias.
The project was also innovative in its educational integration. By embedding the dataset into both informatics and heritage curricula at the University of Edinburgh and exhibiting student dissertations alongside professional work, it extends data-driven research on digital preservation into pedagogical practice. This created a feedback loop between research, teaching, the archive sector, and public engagement with the audience (n=300).
Digital Ghosts was funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Grant and was part of Being Human Festival and the ESRC Social Festival. As public events, it staged an exhibition, a panel discussion, and a workshop. The research resulted in several dissemination outputs, such as the Design Research Conference (paper), International Internet Preservation Consortium Web Archiving Conference (talk and panel discussion), Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage submission, Love Data Week invited talk at the British Library, invited talk at the Fragile Record Seminar at the Institute for Advance Studies, and it was voted as a second runner up for Digital Humanities Awards 2025 in Data Visualisation category.
The project made an echo in the UK GLAM sector, especially among those holding public web archive data as legal deposit, such as The National Archives, the British Library, the Cambridge University Libraries, and the National Library of Scotland, suggesting the potential implementation of the project's recommendations in web archiving practices. Internationally, the Internet Archive, the National Library of France, the National Library of Norway, and the Royal Danish Library all expressed interest in adopting Digital Ghosts' public engagement method. These achievements demonstrate that even with limited funding but a lot of creativity, a large impact can be achieved.
Browse the artworks:
https://inspace.ed.ac.uk/digital-ghosts/
https://vimeo.com/1135792962?fl=pl&fe=vl