GROVE

Grove was University of Florida's once-popular and now-defunct personal web space domain, Grove. From 1996 until 2012 grove.ufl.edu served as a space for students, staff, and faculty to create hosted websites, the contents of which were seemingly unrefereed and ranged from simple resumes and course companions to platforms for cartoon fandom and dating profiles. The earlier sites (1996-2000) are definitely the most interesting from an archaeological perspective and showcase the stylistic leanings and technological prowess (or lack thereof) of early Internet culture. Grove has been archived by Wayback Machine going as a far back as December 1996 and much of the media (sounds, images, narratives) are still intact and harvestable.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, aside from the fascinating little artifacts strewn liberally across each page, is the progressive look a digital archaeologist can participate in because of Wayback Machine's snapshot method, which archives a domain month by month, allowing a person to watch the progress (or lack) made in the maintenance of a student's website. Students obviously spent a finite amount of time at the university and their sites might stall, so to speak, after for or five years. Some students did little to enhance their sites during their time at UF, their web space acting as a sort of "hello world". Staff and faculty on the other hand may have actively maintained their sites for the entire life of Grove (15 years).

Typical Grove site

The technical abilities of each site's creator varies wildly, Many creators follow a recurring apologetic theme, whereby they beg forgiveness for the shoddy construction of their site then proceed to fill it with links, wallpapers, and memory-hodding GIFs. Others were quite adept and included frames (a once-popular phenomenon now forbidden in site creation), embedded videos, and other flashy bits of HTML. Many creators, regardless of their aptitude as designers, were keen on referencing friends' sites, especially if those friends were on Grove and had a noteworthy web space.

I think that Grove is indicative of a nanocosm, which is to say it's a microcosm of a microcosm. In this case, Grove is a lot like GeoCities, which was a guided (but still fairly unhindered) exercise in web development and community building that required little technical expertise. GeoCities effectively democratized the World Wide Web and inducted into its pantheon every mortal who thought the Internet an impenetrable fortress reserved only for god-like hackers. In a hierarchy of "safeness" Grove exists below GeoCities, in that it was administered by a state university, was only open to college constituents, and required little expertise to engage in. Like GeoCities, Grove was focused on community building and exploration of a democratized Internet. Unlike GeoCities, it was enclosed in a safe domain like that of a gigantic university - but the lineage is strong.

Typical GeoCities site

GGF will continue to explore aspects of Grove, as well as any other similarly constructed - and aged - university-tied personal web domains (University of Southern California once maintained a very similar domain that is Grove's closest contemporary). Some thing GGF might explore are artifacts (GIFs, MIDI, multimedia); trends (apologetic openings, site progression); and site of particular note that truly stand out.

I'm willing to concede that Wayback Machine might some day disappear and things like Grove along with it. In order to allay my own fears, I plan on harvesting the entirety of Grove (and any other such domains), backing them up accordingly. Old Dominion's Warrick Tool will likely be the scraper I wield, and Carbonite the storage solution.