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HyperText project
Solstrand seminar: something borrowed, something . . .
what
Bowerbird is a hypermedia theory web robot. This robot semiautomatically crawls pages on the World Wide Web, indexing them against a set of filter words I have defined (words such as hypertext, hypermedia, multimedia, cybertext, etc), and building a public database of content.
why
The advantage of such a robot is that it provides access to otherwise disparate information sources in a single location, with some degree of 'editorialising' so that a search does not produce thousands of irrelevant results. It is, in effect, a specialised version of any major web search engine.
Bowerbird has crawled over 350 web sites, 220,000 pages, and has indexed approximately 10% of these. It currently attracts around 300 hits a week, which is quite low for the quality of the material available.
how
Bowerbird runs on commercially available software (Phantom - http://www.maxum.com/phantom/, is available for Mac or Windows NT, and costs around $300.00 US. It is a good example of a simple, relatively low cost application of information technology to aid research. It currently takes approximately five hours a week of maintenance, research, and updating.
applicability
While bowerbird is specifically orientated towards hypermedia and new media theory content its model is relevant to any applied research project that is web based. The same robot engine can be used to index content for any major academic field, for instance Nordic new media research, Nordic cinema studies, Nordic media studies, etc. It would, in these instances, provide a single point of entry for scholars, students, and researchers to search all Web published work, internationally, in the one location.
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