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Find when a piece of text appears in an archived web page

Works with AWA, IA, NLNZ, UKWA, & UKGWA

Animated gif showing notebook in action

This notebook helps you find when a particular piece of text appears in, or disappears from, a web page. Using Memento Timemaps, it gets a list of available captures from the selected web archive. It then searches each capture for the desired text, displaying the results. You can select the direction in which the notebook searches:

  • First occurrence – find the first capture in which the text appears (start from the first capture and come forward in time)
  • Last occurrence – find the last capture in which the text appears (start from present and go backwards in time)
  • All occurrences – find all matches (start from the first capture and continue until the last)

If you select 'All occurrences' the notebook will generate a simple chart showing how the number of matches changes over time.

Run live in Voila on Binder

Other options

Additional documentation

Getting help

Cite as

Sherratt, Tim; Jackson, Andrew & Bickford, Jake. (2023). GLAM-Workbench/web-archives (version v1.2.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7898218

Section sponsor

The Web Archives section of the GLAM Workbench is sponsored by the British Library.