Platform and App Histories: Assessing Source Availability in Web Archives and App Repositories

In this chapter, we discuss the research opportunities for historical studies of apps and platforms by focusing on their distinctive characteristics and material traces. We demonstrate the value and explore the utility and breadth of web archives and software repositories for building corpora of archived platform and app sources. Platforms and apps notoriously resist archiving due to their ephemerality and continuous updates. As a consequence, their histories are being overwritten with each update rather than written and preserved. We present a method to assess the availability of archived web sources for social media platforms and apps across the leading web archives and app repositories. Additionally, we conduct a comparative source set availability analysis to establish how, and how well, various source sets are represented across web archives. Our preliminary results indicate that despite the challenges of social media and app archiving, many material traces of platforms and apps are in fact well preserved. We understand these contextual materials as important primary sources through which digital objects such as platforms and apps co-author their own “biographies” with web archives and software repositories.