Methodology

Methodology and archive limits

OAI organizes public Orkut community pages preserved by the Internet Archive after Orkut was discontinued in 2014. It is an infrastructure for investigating the history of the web in Brazil through fragmentary archival evidence.

A Raspberry Pi crawler runs continuously, visits alphabetical listings, records available metadata, and uses SQLite checkpoints to resume safely after interruptions. The public database is synchronized daily during review. This is not a complete reconstruction: it is constrained by available snapshots, missing pages, and archival gaps, which must inform any interpretation.

Orkut Digger complements the descriptive index. It is a Chrome and Firefox extension that researchers activate on a preserved community; it visits available forum, topic, and reply pages, records unavailable snapshots, and creates a local CSV with one row per topic and structured replies. It sends no collected content to another server, and its output remains limited by the surviving archive.

Topics and replies are consulted on demand from public captures rather than permanently retained in the index.