📘 Teacher’s Answer Key — Trace the Lineage of a Webpage Using RTTcode

Instructor Guide for archive_org Worksheet#

This key provides:

• model answers
• acceptable variations
• what to look for
• common student errors
• how to evaluate drift‑bounded reasoning

Use this to grade or guide student work.

🧩 1. Choosing a Webpage#

Expected:
Any valid URL that appears in the Internet Archive.

Examples:

• https://www.whitehouse.gov
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)
• https://www.nasa.gov
• https://www.mozilla.org

Common mistakes:

• choosing a URL that has never been archived
• choosing a login‑gated or private page

🧱 2. METADATA_OPERATOR — Expected Answers#

Students should identify:

• substrate_type: usually "html" or "collection"
• regime: "institutional", "scholarly", "commercial", "media", etc.
• drift_sensitivity:
  • "low" for government or static pages
  • "medium" for blogs or software sites
  • "high" for news or commerce
• coherence: "high" for structured sites, "low" for chaotic ones
• lineage_ids: may be empty or contain a root identifier

Teacher notes:
Students should show awareness that metadata is structural, not content‑based.

🕰 3. WAYBACK_OPERATOR — Expected Answers#

Students should collect 3+ snapshots and compare them.

Model drift patterns:

• None: layout identical, minor text changes
• Minor: small structural shifts
• Moderate: layout redesign, navigation changes
• High: complete rebuild, domain change, CMS migration

Continuity breaks:

• missing snapshots
• redirects
• 404 periods
• domain ownership changes

Teacher notes:
Students should not confuse content changes with structural drift.
RTT focuses on structure, not semantics.

🧬 4. LINEAGE_OPERATOR — Expected Answers#

Students should produce a simple lineage graph.

Model lineage:

v2015 → v2018 → v2022
(minor layout change)   (major redesign)

Expected observations:

• what changed structurally
• what remained stable
• whether the page’s purpose shifted

Regime shifts examples:

• informational → promotional
• static HTML → CMS
• government → archived / decommissioned

Teacher notes:
Look for continuity reasoning, not artistic diagrams.

📦 5. COLLECTION_OPERATOR — Expected Answers#

Students should identify:

• whether the page belongs to a collection
• what coherence clusters exist
• what related objects appear

Examples:

• Wikipedia pages → “web_wikipedia_org”
• NASA pages → “nasaweb”
• Government pages → “govdocs”

Teacher notes:
Students should understand that collections provide context, not correctness.

🧱 6. PRESERVATION_OPERATOR — Expected Answers#

Students should identify substrate formats:

• HTML (drift‑prone)
• PDF (stable)
• OCR text (lossy)
• images (stable but incomplete)

Expected stability scores:

• HTML: 0.5–0.8
• PDF: 0.9–1.0
• OCR: 0.3–0.6

Expected drift risk:

• HTML → medium/high
• PDF → low
• OCR → high

Teacher notes:
Students should connect format to drift risk.

🧠 7. DRIFTBOUND_RETRIEVAL_OPERATOR — Expected Summary#

A correct summary includes:

A) Earliest stable version#

• usually the earliest PDF or earliest HTML with consistent structure

B) Most reliable version#

• usually the most recent stable snapshot

C) Key changes#

Examples:

• navigation redesign
• CMS migration
• branding update
• content expansion
• domain redirect

D) Warnings#

Students must include warnings if:

• drift was moderate or high
• substrate was unstable
• continuity breaks occurred

Teacher notes:
The summary must be drift‑bounded — no hallucinated content, no claims beyond structural analysis.

🎓 8. Reflection Questions — Model Responses#

1. What surprised you?#

Model answers:

• “How often the page changed.”
• “How unstable HTML snapshots were.”
• “How many versions were missing.”
• “How consistent government pages are.”

2. Did substrate affect reliability?#

Model answers:

• “PDF versions were far more stable.”
• “OCR text lost structure.”
• “HTML snapshots drifted across years.”

3. How did RTT operators help?#

Model answers:

• “They forced me to separate structure from content.”
• “They made drift visible.”
• “They prevented me from trusting unstable snapshots.”
• “They helped me build a continuity map.”

🧩 Teacher Evaluation Rubric#