This project originated from a general interest in data visualization. Thanks to Austin Mason, a digital humanities professor at Carleton College, we were able to figure out how to relate this topic to a part of Carleton’s history. In a way, a school’s website is the face of the school–it is usually the first place prospective students go to to get more information about the school. Therefore, by studying the ways in which carleton.edu has changed over the years can reveal interesting information on how Carleton has chosen to advertise itself and appeal to new students. We used Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, to access snapshots of the carleton.edu webpage from 1996 to 2020, using one snapshot per year. 1996 only had one snapshot (which was in December) so we chose to use the last snapshot of each year.
