What Did It Look Like: A service for creating website timelapses using the Memento framework

Abstract

Popular web pages are archived frequently, which makes it difficult to visualize the progression of the site through the years at web archives. The What Did It Look Like (WDILL) Twitter bot shows web page transitions by creating a timelapse of a given website using one archived copy from each calendar year. We recently added new features to WDILL, such as date range requests, diversified memento selection, updated visualizations, and sharing visualizations to Instagram. This would allow scholars and the general public to explore the temporal nature of web archives.