2014-01-06: Review of WS-DL's 2013

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a really good year in 2013.  There was a burst of student progress in 2012 and there will likely be more in 2014, but in 2013:

• Mat Kelly passed his breadth exam
• Sawood Alam finished his MS thesis, entered the PhD program, and passed the breadth exam

We (along with many co-authors at other institutions) were involved with 22 publications, including new venues for our group as well as very strong showings at traditional ones such as JCDL (pictured above) and TPDL:

• one Internet RFC (Memento)
• one beta specification (ResourceSync)
• one poster at IEEE VIS
• one paper at the WWW developer track
• two papers at the Temporal Web Workshop
• two D-Lib Magazine articles
• two technical reports
• four full papers and three posters at JCDL
• five full papers at TPDL

Two of the papers received recognition: Scott Ainsworth's paper "Evaluating sliding and sticky target policies by measuring temporal drift in acyclic walks through a web archive" was one of three nominees for Best Student Paper at JCDL, and Yasmin Anwar's paper "Who and What Links to the Internet Archive" won Best Student Paper at TPDL.  Congratulations to Scott and Yasmin, who are the first from our group to receive these honors.

In addition to the conference paper presentations, we presented at a number of conferences that do not have formal proceedings:

• Yasmin received two travel grants to present posters at: Grad Cohort Workshop (CRA-W), and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC)
• Mat presented his software at the Archive-It Partner's Meeting, Digital Preservation, and Personal Digital Archiving
• Ahmed AlSum and I (Michael Nelson) had several presentations at the IIPC General Assembly (our department also officially joined IIPC this year)  
• Justin Brunelle, Hany SalahEldeen, Ahmed, and Yasmin all gave presentations at the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop (held after JCDL)
• I gave an invited presentation at the Wolfram Data Summit 
• Michele Weigle gave a keynote at the Southeast Women in Computing Conference

We also released (or updated) a number of software packages for public use:

• Mat released two: WARCreate and WAIL
• Ahmed created "mcurl", a Memento-enable curl command
• Hany released Carbon Date 
• Sawood released HTTP Mailbox
• Shawn Jones released a Memento plugin for MediaWiki

Our research activities continued to enjoy a lot of coverage in the popular press.  Some of the highlights include:

• "Internet Archaeologists Reconstruct Lost Web Pages", MIT Technology Review
• "How to Carbon-Date a Web Page", MIT Technology Review
• "Archiving the Internet", Virginia Public Radio
• "Computer Scientists Measure How Much of the Web is Archived", MIT Technology Review

Getting external funding is increasingly difficult, but we did manage two small new grants this year:

• M. C. Weigle (PI), M. L. Nelson, "Archive What I Can See Now", NEH, $57,892
• M. L. Nelson, "Enhanced Memento Support for MediaWiki", Andrew Mellon Foundation, $25,000

Lastly, we're awfully excited and proud about these upcoming student opportunities:

• In a few months Ahmed will begin a full-time position as a Web Archive Engineer at the Stanford University Libraries (SUL)
• Hany will spend the spring semester with Min-Yen Kan's Web Information Retrieval / Natural Language Processing Group (WING) at the National University of Singapore

Thanks to all that made 2013 a great success for WS-DL!  We're looking forward to an even better 2014.

--Michael


2014-01-09 Edit:

Ahmed AlSum was the winner of the 2013 WS-DL lunch pail award (inspired by Bud Foster's "lunch pail defense"), awarded at yesterday's luncheon.  Previous winners of the lunch pail include Martin Klein and Matthias Prellwitz.