Hyperlink is not dead!

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou (1) , Mathieu Jacomy (1) , Paul Girard (1) , Guillaume Plique (1)

1 médialab - médialab (Sciences Po)

The emergence and success of web platforms raised a gimmick into social studies: “Hyperlink is dead!“. Capturing web users into mobile applications and private web platforms to propose them a specific user experience (and a business model) created indeed new silos in the open World Wide Web space. The simplified availability of user behavioural data through these platforms APIs reinforced this idea in academic communities by providing scholars with a rich and easy way to collect user centric data for their research. After discussing the methodological and ethical aspects of the web divide between platforms and classical websites, we will argue in this communication that hyperlinks, although more complex to collect, manipulate and apprehend, remain an invaluable matter to use the web as a research field. We will illustrate it using Hyphe, a dedicated web corpus creation tool we developed to mine hypertexts.

Keywords: hyperlink; hypertext; web mining; crawler; network analysis; Hyperlink hypertext web mining crawler corpus curation network analysis; Hyperlink; corpus; curation

Domains: Web; Document and Text Processing; Social and Information Networks [cs.SI]; Library and information sciences; Sociology; Methods and statistics

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou, Mathieu Jacomy, Paul Girard, Guillaume Plique. Hyperlink is not dead!. 2nd International Conference on Web Studies (WS.2), Université Paris 8; Archives Nationales; MSH Paris Nord, Oct 2018, Paris, France. pp.12-18, ⟨10.1145/3240431.3240434⟩. ⟨hal-01908002⟩