![]() From there, there’s a few other things you’ll need: Don’t forget to watch the video embedded below as well.Īll you need to start is a computer - any computer, from your personal laptop to a hulking gaming PC - with internet access. But we’ll run through some of the basics below. We walk through how to set up the Auto Archiver in more thorough detail in our GitHub code repository. While the Auto Archiver is very easy to use once it has been set-up, there are a few steps to go through that require small aspects of technical knowledge before you can begin using it. The Auto Archiver always takes a screenshot of the content and will append it to the link row when configured to do so, along with the archived content itself and other metadata pertaining to the archived content. However, this means any video content will likely not be archived (one of the limitations of using the Wayback Machine alone for online preservation) and it should be viewed as a limited fallback mechanism. If all of those fail, the link is submitted to the Wayback Machine. ![]() Since platforms have different formats and barriers, the Auto Archiver combines existing video downloading tools like yt-dlp - a command-line tool that allows you to download YouTube videos - with individual social media archiving tools.Īt the time of writing, these exist for Telegram, Tiktok, Twitter, and VKontakte. This depends on the inputted platform and content type. When the Auto Archiver sees a link that hasn’t been archived yet - or, in other words, has an empty status in their respective cell in the sheet - it is programmed to look for the best archiving strategy. Let’s say there’s a piece of content online you’d like to archive, a web page or a social media post with videos and images: all you have to do is grab its URL and input it into a new row on the Google Spreadsheet where the Auto Archiver has been instructed to look for links. The tool is essentially a one-stop shop for your archiving needs. What can the Auto Archiver do?īefore we dive into how to set it up, let’s look at the basics of how the Auto Archiver works. But don’t worry - by the end of this article we’ll have explained how to get started with the Auto Archiver. ĭepending on your level of technical knowledge, setting up the Auto Archiver might seem intimidating at first. OSR 4 Rights even provides an online form to test the Archiver on a link via their website. So far, we’ve used it to capture content depicting incidents of civilian harm during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as in other rapidly-evolving situations like the Tajik-Kyrgyz border conflict of September 2022.Ī screen grab of an Auto Archiver execution for the Tajik-Kyrgyz border conflict.īut it’s not just Bellingcat that has been using the Auto Archiver - organisations like the Centre for Information Resilience and OSR 4 Rights have also used it to help their researchers systematically archive content from ongoing conflict situations. The Auto Archiver is an ongoing project first created by Bellingcat data scientist, Logan Williams, with Bellingcat’s Investigative Tech Team and our community contributors now regularly working to make improvements to the software. Our Auto Archiver complements those practices by creating a uniform and streamlined archiving process regardless of platform or media type. These methods are of particular relevance amidst Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. We have previously written on how to manually archive open source materials, as well as specifically Telegram content. The tool allows for posts, and their video or visual attachments, to be archived by simply entering a link into a Google Sheets document. ![]() That’s why we at Bellingcat created a tool - the Auto Archiver - to help the open-source community, as well as journalists and researchers, easily archive online content. However, these posts can be taken down by platforms or deleted by those posting them. Open source research often relies on social media posts that contain videos and images.
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