For our final project (which you can find here), we studied the content and layout of Carleton.edu between 1994-2020. We performed text analysis with Voyant tools to find the most common words that appeared on the website each year, and found that “students” and “campus” rose in frequency over the years. We also used Photoshop to perform visual analysis of the layout of the website, as well as ImageJ to study the color properties of the images featured on the website each year. We found that the site has undergone many changes in order to stay updated with technological advancements and trends in website design.
From both of these analysis, we discovered that there has been an increasing effort to stress the importance and closeness of the Carleton community to the viewers of Carleton.edu.
Team Wayback,
Your presentation was great and you have done a lot of interesting work on both textual and visual analysis of the homepage, which is starting to take shape on the website. My major suggestion is to add a homepage that, like Robots Reading Vogue gives you thumbnail images with the opportunity to link directly to the different pages on the techniques you used.
I would also break the Visual and Textual Analysis pages into sub pages, with the parent holding a brief discussion of the overall efforts of the team, and a sub page each for the analyses, e.g. Cover Averages and Image Histograms for Visual. You could link directly to these from the home page or menu and avoid readers getting lost in too much text.
Finally, I’d like to so more detailed discussion of process, especially on the data acquisition side. Add a new page on the Source Data addressing how you used the Wayback machine to gather data, how you stored and processed it, etc. And in the individual analyses, how did you do the work. For histograms, how does ImageJ work, what code snippets did you run to generate the graph, etc?
Separating out the pieces into bite sized chunks and making the user experience of your site clearer and more visual will show off all your good work to best effect.