2017-01-08: Review of WS-DL's 2016

Sawood and Mat show off the InterPlanetary Wayback poster at JCDL 2016

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a productive 2016, with two Ph.D. and one M.S. students graduating, one large research grant awarded ($830k), 16 publications, and 15 trips to conferences, workshops, hackathons, etc.

For student graduations, we had:
Other student advancements:
We had 16 publications in 2016:

 
In late April, we had Herbert, Harish Shankar, and Shawn Jones visit from LANL.  Herbert has been here many times, but this was the first visit to Norfolk for Harish.  It was also on the visit that Shawn did his breadth exam.


In addition to the fun road trip to JCDL 2016 in New Jersey (which included beers on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry!), our group traveled to:
WS-DL at JCDL 2016 Reception in Newark, NJ
Alex shows off his poster at JCDL 2016
Although we did not travel to San Francisco for the 20th Anniversary of the Internet Archive, we did celebrate locally with tacos, DJ Spooky CDs, and a series of tweets & blog posts about the cultural impact and importance of web archiving.  This was in solidarity with the Internet Archive's gala which featured taco trucks and a lecture & commissioned piece by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky). We write plenty of papers, blog posts, etc. about technical issues and the mechanics of web archiving, but I'm especially proud of how we were able to assemble a wide array of personal stories about the social impact of web archiving.  I encourage you to take the time to go through these posts.


We had only one popular press story about our research this year, with Tech.Co's "You Can’t Trust the Internet to Continue Existing" citing Hany SalahEldeen's 2012 TPDL paper about the rate of loss of resources shared via Twitter.

We released several software packages and data sets in 2016:
In April we were extremely fortunate to receive a major research award, along with Herbert Van de Sompel at LANL, from the Andrew Mellon Foundation:
This project will address a number of areas, including: Signposting, automated assessment of web archiving quality, verification of archival integrity, and automating the archiving of non-journal scholarly output.  We will soon be releasing several research outputs as a result of this grant.

WS-DL reviews are also available for 2015, 2014, and 2013.  We're happy to have graduated Greg, Yasmin, and Justin; and we're hoping that we can get Erika back for a PhD after her MS is completed.  I'll close with celebratory images of me (one dignified, one less so...) with Dr. AlNoamany and Dr. Brunelle; may 2017 bring similarly joyous and proud moments.

--Michael



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