Palestinian Governmental Websites Before and After Hamas Came to Power

Assignment

Context

The Internet Archive project documents snapshots of websites at different points in time. In which ways can these snapshots be used for Internet research? One suggested option is to examine the assumption that the Web mirrors political processes and vice versa, by tracking changes made to websites over time. Do Websites change in response to political processes? Or, alternatively, could the evolution of these sites (as depicted in the different snapshots) reflect the enfolding of political processes as they were taking place, or even before that? In this assignment, snapshots of official Palestinian governmental websites at different points in time are being tracked, showing that on the Web, the process of Hamas taking over the Fatah party in ruling the Palestinian National Authority has started long before it happened on the ground.

Method

Archive.org is searched for a list of urls. A scraper collects the urls returned by the Internet Archive for each query, and creates an XML file with the snapshots of the searched url over time. The xml file can be edited for specific snapshots (in relevant points in time). Eventually, the xml file is converted into a flash file, showing a moving image of the transformation of a certain url over time.
For this assignment, two sets of urls are searched for in the Internet Archive:
1. A list of select Palestinian Governmental URLS
2. A list of Hamas official Websites (in English)

Findings

Implications and Devices

archive2 palestine1 wayback machine2 create new tag