The Periodic Archiving Daemon
AIO Data Donation Solutions
The Periodic Archiving Daemon is a software research solution that has been developed by members of the Australian Internet Observatory. The solution empowers citizen scientists to donate data about their web experiences, to promote research projects that utilize archives of web content in their data.
The central part of the solution takes the form of a web browser plugin - the plugin periodically 'wakes up' and accesses web pages while you go about your usual web experience. It then submits web archive data to a cloud-based database, where it can then be managed and interpreted by relevant researchers.
This online guide has been designed to make usage of the Periodic Archiving Daemon streamlined and intuitive, so that it may be easily white-labelled and adapted to various research contexts.
Some of the key advantages of this approach, which are elaborated throughout this guide are summarised below:
📦 Adapted to Chromium Manifest version 2 and 3, for publication to a variety of Browser Extension Stores, such as:
⏩ To avoid review turn-arounds with browser extension stores, scraper functionality is designed to instead update in real-time.
🎛️ Designed to run as a 'daemon process' and optimized to create minimal disturbance to regular web-browsing experience.
🎭 Can spoof differ kinds of user agents, allowing for wider data capture possibilities.
🦾 Comes with a variety of scraper functionalities and configurations.
🏷️ Easily customized and white-labelled, for fast-tracked adoption to different research projects.
As with any research project, the Periodic Archiving Daemon requires set up from both a researcher and participant perspective. Feel free to visit the 'Getting Started' section to begin.