![The archived Instagram profile of the artist Amalia Ulman, as captured by a new tool from Rhizome, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the New Museum.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141022173627im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/18/business/18bits-rhizome/18bits-rhizome-blog480.jpg)
Updated, 1:00 p.m. | Added a mention of the underlying software, which is freely available for others to use.
When you use a service like Facebook or Twitter, you are exploring a constantly changing world. New items pop up as you scroll down. The screen morphs as you move past a video that begins to play automatically or click on a button to pull up someone’s comments on a post. And that’s just now — both services looked very different just a few years ago and will continue to change.
So how could you share the experience of Facebook as it is today with someone who has never used it? A screen shot of the social network does not convey how it actually works. You could use screen-recording software to follow your every movement on the site, but like the home movies of old, that can be tedious to view.
What makes the Internet special is the ability to delve into the details or follow odd little side roads. On Facebook, that might mean a detour to see the wedding photos of a long-lost friend, or read a heartfelt essay on the death of a parent, or follow the public conversations on topics like the Ebola virus.
Right now, there’s no way to preserve that kind of complex, immersive experience. But Rhizome, a New York nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and conserving digital artwork, is trying to build a new kind of data recorder to do just that.
Rhizome has already developed a rough prototype of a tool that records all the content you experience on a website as you click around, then uses that information to create a simulation of the website that you or someone else can explore again however you want.
This week, the organization, which is affiliated with the New Museum, plans to publicly demonstrate the technology, which it calls Colloq. It has recorded the Instagram portion of a performance art project by the artist Amalia Ulman, who assumed four different stereotypical female roles over the course of several months and posted material on Instagram and Facebook under those identities.
As you can see from this sneak peek, the simulation is far better than any screen shot, allowing a user to click on individual photos and see the likes and comments.
“As close as possible, you’re going to get the experience of interacting with the actual site,” said Jon Ippolito, a professor of new media at the University of Maine who has advised Rhizome and is familiar with the tool. “It is reconstructing it, bit by bit, in a technology that is very close to the original and allows users to explore it interactively the way they could with the original.”
Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s digital conservator, said the group’s initial goal was to help artists preserve their digital works so that future visitors could see them as they were intended to be displayed. Rhizome also plans to make its tool available to scholars conducting social research.
The archiving software was developed in conjunction with Ilya Kreymer, a former programmer for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and he has made the underlying code freely available for others to use or modify.
The technology, which is adaptable to many sites, has many potential applications, like capturing important moments in history or culture.
Zachary Kaplan, Rhizome’s community manager, said he wished the tool had been around to capture the online discussions about race after the events in Ferguson, Mo., in August. The conversations were prominent for a week or two on networks like Twitter and Facebook but are now hard to pull up. “If you can’t see it, you can’t discuss it,” he said.
Eventually, Rhizome hopes to make a consumer-friendly version of its tool that anyone can use.
Last week, the Knight Foundation awarded Rhizome a $35,000 grant to refine its prototype.
Chris Barr, director of media innovation at the foundation, which provides seed funding to many projects, said Rhizome’s preservation goal was important, especially as giant companies like Facebook and Twitter repeatedly change their sites and as services like the once-prominent Friendster and GeoCities shut down.
“These companies are controlling the pipes for large amounts of human information, and their algorithms are changing on a daily basis,” he said. “How do we archive and preserve these dynamic experiences that are shaping our culture?”
The work of Rhizome and others who copy content from websites poses some sticky legal and ethical questions. Facebook and many other sites generally have limits on how data from their services can be captured and reused. Rhizome has not yet discussed its simulation tool with the leading social networks, and it is quite possible that they will try to block it.
A spokesman for Facebook, which also owns Instagram, declined to comment.
Facebook, which has complex privacy rules to limit who can see what, poses special challenges.
Ms. Ulman, who works from Los Angeles and London, said that the Facebook portion of her performance drew far more comments and interaction than the Instagram posts, but she was reluctant to record that. “No one really knew I was performing,” she said. “It would be really complicated to archive that and keep the privacy of people.”
But Professor Ippolito, who is a co-author of a new book on digital preservation called “Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory,” said that giving people the tools to record their activities on Facebook and other sites was important to allow people to regain control over their own data.
“It puts the ability to capture data back in the hands of the individuals,” he said. “The user is in the driver’s seat, instead of the social network that now owns that user’s information.”