Hyperlink is not dead!

The emergence and success of web platforms nurtured a trend
within social studies: “Hyperlink is dead!”. Capturing their users
into mobile applications and specialised web interface to propose
them a specific user experience (and business model), the platforms
indeed created new information silos in the open World Wide Web
space. The simplified availability of user behavioural data through
these platforms APIs reinforced this idea in academic communities
by providing scholars with an easy way to collect rich user centric
data for their research. After discussing the methodological aspects
of the web divide between platforms and classical websites, we will
argue that although it becomes more and more invisible, the hyperlink, modern incarnation of intertextual links between documents,
is still a central and structural element of the web. Hyperlinks remain an invaluable resource to turn the web into a research field
in spite of the complexity to collect, manipulate and curate them.
We will illustrate those methodological challenges by describing
the choices we made in designing Hyphe, a tool dedicated to the
creation of web corpora tailored for mining hypertexts.