Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

An unprecedented four Web Science & Digital Library ( WS-DL ) courses will be offered in Fall 2017:  CS 418/518 " Web Programming ", Tuesdays 4:20-7:00 pm (CRNs 14356 & 14357), will be offered by Dr. Justin F. Brunelle .  This will be an updated version of CS 418/518 last taught in Fall 2016 by Dr. Brunelle.  CS 734/834 " Introduction to Information Retrieval ", Thursdays 4:20-7:00 pm (CRNs 13631 & 13639) offered by Dr. Michael L. Nelson .  This will be an updated version of the same course most recently taught in Fall 2016 .   CS 725/825 " Information Visualization ", Fridays 8:30-11 am (CRNs 19344 & 19345) offered by Dr. Michele C. Weigle .  This will be an updated version of the same course most recently taught in Spring 2017 .  CS 791/891 " Web Archiving Seminar ", Wednesdays 2:00-4:30 pm (CRNs 21302 & 21303) offered by Drs. Nelson & Weigle.  This is a new seminar for incoming and prospective WS-DL student...

A photo of me inside "The Yellow House" - The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society On June 5, 2017, I started work as an Intern at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University under the supervision of Dr.  Rob Faris , the Research Director for the Berkman Klein Center. This was a wonderful opportunity to conduct news media related research, and my second consecutive Summer research at Harvard. The Berkman Klein Center is an interdisciplinary research center that researches the means to tackle some of the biggest challenges on the Internet. Located in a yellow house at the Harvard Law School, the Center is committed to studying the development, dynamics, norms and standards of cyberspace. The center has produced many significant contributions such as the review of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and the founding of the DPLA (Digital Public Library of America). During the first week of my Inter...

Extending our previous discussion about how the proposed rel="identifier" is different from rel="canonical" (spoiler alert: "canonical" is only for pages with duplicative text ), here I summarize various discussions about why we can't use rel="bookmark" for the proposed scenarios .  We've already given a brief review of why rel="bookmark" won't work (spoiler alert: it is explicitly prohibited for HTML <link> elements or HTTP Link: headers) but here we more deeply explore the likely original semantics.  I say "likely original semantics" because: the short phrases in the IANA link relations registry ("Gives a permanent link to use for bookmarking purposes") and the HTML5 specification ("Gives the permalink for the nearest ancestor section") are not especially clear, nor is the example in the HTML5 specification.  rel="bookmark" exists to address a problem, anonymous co...

Figure 1: Summing primary and secondary followers for @ODUNow Our University Twitter Engagement (UTE) rank is based on the friend and extended follower network of primary and affiliated secondary Twitter accounts referenced on a university's home page. We show that UTE has a significant, positive correlation with expert university reputation rankings (e.g., USN&WR , THE , ARWU ) as well as rankings by endowment, enrollment, and athletic expenditures (EEE). As illustrated in Figure 1, we bootstrap the process by starting with the URI for the university's homepage obtained from the detailed institutional profile information in the ranking lists. For each URI, we navigated to the associated webpage and searched the HTML source for links to valid Twitter handles. Once the Twitter screen name was identified, the Twitter GET users/Show API was used to retrieve the URI from the profile of each user name. If the domain of the URI matched exactly or resolved to the known do...

Last Wednesday, August 9, 2017, I was invited to give a talk to some summer interns of the Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University. Every summer our department invites some undergrad students from India and hosts them for about a month to work on some projects under a research lab here as summer interns. During this period, various research groups introduce their work to those interns to encourage them to become potential graduate applicants. Those interns also act as academic ambassadors who motivate their colleagues back in India for higher studies. This year, Mr. Ajay Gupta invited a group of 20 students from  Acharya Institute of Technology and B.N.M. Institute of Technology and supervised them during their stay at  Old Dominion University . Like the last year, I was selected from the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group again to introduce them with the concept of web archiving and various researches of our lab. An overview of the talk ...

A social card generated by Facebook for my previous blog post. Rich links, snippet , social snippet, social media card , Twitter card , embedded representation, rich object , social card . These visualizations of web objects now pervade our existence on and off of the Web. The concept has been used to render web documents as results in academic research projects, like in Omar Alonso's " What's Happening and What Happened: Searching the Social Web ". oEmbed is a standard for producing rich embedded representations of web objects for a variety of consuming services. Google experiments with using richer objects in their search results , even including images  and other content from pages. Facebook , Twitter , Tumblr , Storify , and other tools use these cards. They have become so ubiquitous that services that do not produce these cards, like Google Hangouts , seem antiquated. These cards also no longer just sit within the confines of the web browser, being used ...