Hyperlink is not dead!

Abstract

The emergence and success of web platforms nurtured a trend within social studies: "Hyperlink is dead!". Capturing their users into mobile applications and specialised web interface to propose them a specific user experience (and business model), the platforms indeed created new information 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 an easy way to collect rich user centric data for their research. After discussing the methodological aspects of the web divide between platforms and classical websites, we will argue that although it becomes more and more invisible, the hyperlink, modern incarnation of intertextual links between documents, is still a central and structural element of the web. Hyperlinks remain an invaluable resource to turn the web into a research field in spite of the complexity to collect, manipulate and curate them. We will illustrate those methodological challenges by describing the choices we made in designing Hyphe, a tool dedicated to the creation of web corpora tailored for mining hypertexts.