About US
Built from the ground up for security and privacy
Web Historian is a browser extension for Google Chrome that helps you visualize the web browsing history that is already on your computer in a way you’ve never seen before. You can see what you’ve been looking for online and how you navigate through the web using interactive visuals.
Many companies collect and analyze web browsing history for marketing and advertising purposes, but browsing history data has been less accessible to those who want to analyze their own web browsing behavior, and to researchers who study the social impact of the web. That is why Web Historian was created.
Web Historian is an open source project developed specifically to provide users with as much transparency and control over their own information as possible. When users install Web Historian they download a program that runs only on their computer, not online using client side JavaScript. Users can opt-in to donate their data and complete a survey about their media use after they install Web Historian and remove anything they want from their browsing history.
Our Team
Ericka Menchen-Trevino
Frequently Asked Questions
LATEST NEWS
Notes on features and events
Visits vs. Habits: What’s the difference?
One of the best features of WebHistorian is that you can learn more about your web browsing through different lenses. When navigating your own specific bubble chart users can choose to look at web site visits through the “all visits” tab, and the “daily habits” tab. So it’s important to understand the difference between total[…]
Saturday Oct. 8, Berlin – Presentation “Using web browsing histories to facilitate multi-method research”
Dr. Ericka Menchen-Trevino will give a presentation at the Association of Internet Researchers conference entitled “Using web browsing histories to facilitate multi-method research.” This presentation will explain the methodological innovations of the web historian project for internet research. These include the use of data visualization to enable informed consent, the ability to collect self-reported and[…]
iConference Poster Presentation, March 2016
We are happy to announce that Ericka Menchen-Trevino’s paper “Web Historian: Enabling multi-method and independent research with real-world web browsing history data” will be presented as a poster at iConference 2016 in Philadelphia, and the associated short paper will be published in the conference proceedings. Below is the abstract, and this is a link to[…]
Website refresh
The Web Historian website is re-launching with a new theme. Over the next few days we will reload (and update) the previous content in the new format. Over the next few months we will add a full online demo of the visualizations, as well as an updated video and our very own Web Historian Twitter account.