Retaining and Exploring Digital Traces: Towards an Excavation of Virtual Settlements

The present work rests and elaborates on the assumption that social technologies are increasingly turned into computer-mediated virtual settlements, thereby allowing the excavation of a variety of enacted cyber-phenomena such as ad hoc online ensembles, informal social networks and virtual communities, on the grounds of “digital” traces or remains. In this vein, the authors motivate and present a method for virtual excavations that is tightly coupled to a transformational technology such as knowledge visualization. The analytical and explanatory value of the method is assessed using two case studies addressing representative genres of social technologies, namely web sites augmented with social plug-ins and social networking services. Analysis reveals intrinsic aspects of “digital” traces and remains, the form they take in today’s social web and the means through which they can be excavated and transformed to useful information. It turns out that such virtual excavations, when organized and conducted carefully, Retaining and Exploring Digital Traces: Towards an Excavation of Virtual Settlements Demosthenes Akoumianakis Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece Giannis Milolidakis Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece George Vlachakis Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece Nikolas Karadimitriou Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece Giorgos Ktistakis Department of Applied Information Technology & Multimedia, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4022-1.ch016