Archiving websites at next election

I have seen Sally's request on the Digital-preservation list.

Does anyone know of any person or body who is/are archiving (or intending to archive) the web sites of non-mainstream political parties and those of individual candidates during previous and forthcoming UK general elections?

I 'm in the same situation as Sally's, though as an individual researcher.

In brief.

I will be studying the use of the web by a range of political organizations at the next general in the UK. The project will be part of an international study, Internet and elections, supported by the Webarchivist (http://www.webarchivist.org/projects.html).

I will download, archive and later analyse the websites of parties and candidates, and possibly, time permitting, also a sample of pressure groups. I was thinking of applying for JISC space and server, and run off-the-shelf crawling software.

Though it sounds to me like a bit of replication here. Is not that the remit of the UK Web Archiving Consortium? Is the BL planning to do something similar? A prevoius message to the list suggests so, fortunately.

So I went on to read the conditions of archiving at the UKWAC site. Elections seem indeed a suitable archiving matter, as they're highly topical (not to mention that the data generated could be easily linked to BES data or other electoral data, and produce very interesting insights, under the heading of e-social science<). But who will archive the election? Where will it be stored? What will be archived, and when? And, most importantly, will they be _able_ to archive?

Copyright is a huge obstacle here. The 'written agreement' required from every single entity whose website is archived seems to me overly restrictive. And it will be unworkable. Has anyone tried to get hold of a party communications manager during a campaign? I did (not manage). Or try and have the webmaster sign the agreement: the request will go up and down so many stairs that you'll soon loose count. Possibly though I'm a bit of a pessimist.

But I was talking at a conference last summer with Steve Schneider, at SUNY. He is managing the webarchivist.org: they have archived 2002 and 2004 US elections for a range of political actors, and have a comprehensive archive of post 9-11 as well. Main headache they had was not technical e.g. the crawler and java, but bureaucratic, as organisation were not returning agreements, as it happens.

Is there a way to enforce a 'silence-approval' agreement, whereby institutions have to opt out rather than opt in?

Another bit of puzzle: there are party websites archives in the Netherlands and in the US, in Australia and in Finland, etc, etc. In the UK, the BLPES has an election ephemera collection (technically it is still my library, and an exceptionally good one) . What is so different with archiving the web instead of leaflets, banners, posters, speeches, rosettes, etc, etc, etc? Don't libraries, especially copyright libraries in the UK, have special rights? And, as a users, can't I just walk into my library and consult a digital archive?

2004 US election: panel study

I was asked to give a presentation to MMU, later in the term, on new media and the forthcoming British election.

Going through my files to see how the lesson from the US could be applied to the design of interviews in the UK I came acorss a wealth of cuttings and articles from the 'online campaign' point of view, but little in terms of the comparative importance of different media in a 'media intense' campaign as it was. (apart form some data presented by Stephen Coleman and Phil Noble at a Hansard event).

Then I found an email pointing me to 2004 Elecion Panel Study, conducted by the BYU Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and UW-Madison Wisconsin Advertising Project. It looks at the volume, tone, and type of campaign communication in realtion to attitudes and behavior of voters using a three-wave panel between June 2004 and Election Day, i.e interviewing the same repondents at different times during the campaign.

The survey is aimed at TV vieweing more thatn any other mass media. However, there is a question (on Wave 1) on email as a campaign tool, Q. 54, which might prove, comparativelywith other forms of solicitation, interesting to analyse. And more, who knows, mihgt be included in following waves. I'll need to track that.

BSA and the Intenret

As some of you might know, one project in the ESRC eSociety Programme is concerned with the Internet and social capital (John Curtice, Pippa Norris and Catherine Bromley). The 2004 wave of the British Social Attitudes carried some questions on socio-political uses of the Internet, which I was curious to interrogate.

I attendend Pippa Norris' presentation at APSA 2004(well, being on the same panel that was difficult to miss...), and then Catherine Bromley's presentation at a November eSociety event. But I felt something was missing... the printed stuff. So I just got myself a copy of the 2004 publication "British Social Attitudes; the 21st Report", which will make a useful addition. I'm sure to report back when I've got round to reading it.

BBC vs Google

How about the BBC challenging Google for the provision of online services?

"We have got the best content in the world and a more flexible rights framework than anyone," says [Ashley] Highfield. "We have the best brand, I would argue, online in the world in terms of trust and impartiality. We've also got access to some of the best technology in the world. If you glue all of that together we should be in a prime position to create the best next-generation search navigation tool in the world," he enthuses.

I was wondering whether this would include a challenge to the real core of Google's power, the ubiquitous search engine.

Come to think of it, I generally go google, and then iBBC if no luck on the first few screens.

recursivity

Leihgton Andrews, AM, spotted us spotting him..

Maybe Tim Ireland was right about transparency, after all. And it took less than 24 hours to close the loop (or to give it another round).

yet another MP blogging

While I was updating the directory of MPs websites I came across this weblog for Nick Raynsford, MP. To count or not to count as a blog? Uhm, tough choice.

Last week two more members of the National Assembly for Wales have joined pioneer Peter Black, AM. These are Leighton Andrews AM and David Davies AM .

Still no sign of any MSPs blogging, despite the efforts of Tom Findaly and his Online Parliamentarian.

UN Global E-government Readiness Report 2004

According to the UN Global E-government Readiness Report 2004, Britain is a the top of the table for e-participation among 191 member states of the UN. By e-participation it is meant:

the quality, relevance, usefulness and the willingness of government websites for providing online information and participatory tools and services to the people.

Also, the UK comes third, behind the US and Denmark, in the e-readiness scale, that is 'in delivering information and services through the internet combined with the infrastructure needed to dispense them.'

As to e-partiticiaption, this has three objectives, which are tapped by the index:

a) Increasing e-information to citizens for decision making;
b) Enhancing e-consultation for deliberative and participatory processes; and
c) Supporting e-decision making by increasing the input of citizens in decision making (report p. 19)

On the method side:

21 citizen informative and participatory services and facilities were assessed across 191 countries in e-information, e-consultation, and e-decision making across six general, economic and social sectors. Each country was assessed on a scale of 0-4. The index was constructed by standardizing the scores. (report p. 20)

The measure is qualitative and rater-dependent, an additional score given when the 'national online presence' is assessed for other web-related measures (see report p. 166).

For the sake of testing ecological inference, on the UK side Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts have conducted in 2002 and 1999 'Government of the Web', for the National Audit Office, which aims at assessing broadly the same range of indicators. This might provide some additional insight on the state of e-government in the UK (though things have been in constant flux of recent)

public opinion survey - almost there !

Had a meting with Stephen Ward on Friday as to the finalisation of the report on our public opinion survey, British component. The survey was conducted by NOP, in December 2004, and looks at Briton's reactions to 'virtual representation' . Teh draft report is ready, we need to finalise and disseminate.

The report will be press released sometime next week by the eSociety, to a range of distribution lists. Finger crossed we will get some coverage and attention. I will post the healdines and a link to the report on the blog as well, just in case.

We are also having some 50 interviews (with MPs and officials in 7 parliaments) transcribed at present, but that will have to wait until February.

Political blogging

All blogging is political it seems. Or not.

I met with Tim Ireland, the other night, in London. In many a way he's one of the most influential political bloggers in Britain, writing about the Sun, current affair and, ehr, MPs blogging. He gave me food for thought on the nature of blogging, i.e. what makes it different, and its possible effect on the political system.

In the first respect, he was saying that its' all about trust, transparency and the distribution of social intelligence. By that meaning, a blogger's influence is function of her capacity to build an argument which is based on demonstrable evidence, and stands the test of other bloggers' scrutiny (and the public as well). In this way a blogger builds trust, or reputation, and authority with that. Transparency ir required to coalesce this process, at different levels: IP, content, personae. That is you need to know where your traffic and comments are coming from, the author of posts/comments and where the evidence is to support an argument. The third element is the dynamic facet of transparency-enabled trust: social intelligence thrives in cyberspace where filters allow for the decanting of knowledge. That is, the logic of blogging filters in socially functional thoughts and filters out noise.

This has consequences for politics and to some extent also democracy. Well, we agreed that it does, in four overlapping respects. First, blogging is a form of glorified, old time journalism, by which the truth emerges most of the time from research, testing and critical, peer assessment. Second, blogging is a collective exercise in online deliberation, as bloggers come together as a public online. They judge other bloggers on the grounds of the evidence presented through rational scrutiny, and challenge authority with authority. Plus, on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog-blogger. Finally, this process leads to the collectivised and bottom-owned articulation of social intelligence, by which new meanings are built and new structure of knowledge, and power, created. Finally, related to that, blogging is a great campaigning toll, which exploits citizens' apathy and laziness, and is thoroughly embedded in search engine dynamics. It comes down to who comes up. And this is crucial for political campaigns.

Of course each of these models has flaws and each complements the others. But enough for now, I'll need to take a deep breath and think about what I just said. I'll leave it for tomorrow.

And this is not quite the terms in which we've discussed it, rather an academic rendition of the chat we had. Tom Watson chimed in briefly at the meeting, but I reckon he was too bored by blog-academic spiel to stay for long. Which sort of makes sense, as the 'chat' was 3-hours long; most of the other stuff from the meeting will be coming out, Steve Ward and I hope, as a research note for our research project. Well, thanks Tim, much appreciated.

After christmas

Fresh start of blogging activities after the Christmas break. Quite a few things to catch up with. Stay tuned.