2019-01-07: Review of WS-DL's 2018

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The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a strong year, with the most significant event being our expansion from two professors to four.  Beginning in Fall 2018, we added two new assistant professors:
We're very lucky to have them both join WS-DL.  Their collective experience in HCI, ML, Big Data, and mining scholarly data increases the capabilities of our team and will allow WS-DL to greatly expand our teaching and research portfolios. For example, we will offer a record five WS-DL classes for Spring 2019.

Dr. Michele Weigle and I also had an eventful 2018: she was promoted to full professor and I received a joint appointment with Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center (VMASC).

In 2018 we also had three MS students graduate, two students do internships, two students advance to PhD candidacy, one new research grant ($248k) awarded, 11 publications, and 11 trips to conferences, workshops, hackathons, internships, etc.







We had 11 publications in 2018.  This total does not include the 2018 publications from Drs. Wu and Jayarathna since those were already in the pipeline prior to them joining WS-DL; their contributions will be included in the 2019 summary.  Our students' publications this year mainly centered around three conferences, with one "best poster" award and two "best paper" nominations:





























In addition to iPres, Hypertext, and JCDL/JCDL-DC/WADL/KDD, we also attended 12 additional events:











We were fortunate enough to host Michael Herzog and several other members of Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal in March.


For internal and local outreach, we did several presentations, seminars, and colloquiums within ODU and Norfolk.







This year was exceptionally good for public outreach about web archiving.  I was quoted in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Vox, culminating in an interview on CNN in April.  The entire story is nicely summarized in an ODU press release.





We've continued to update existing and release new software and datasets via our GitHub account. Given the nature of software and data, sometimes it can be difficult a specific release date, but this year our significant releases and updates include:
This year we also had a number of significant contributions that were not software, data, nor conventional publications.  Instead, they were quick analyses, evaluations, definitions, or reviews.  They may yet form the basis of future publications, but the blog allowed for rapid release:
For funding, we were able to continue our string of nine consecutive years with new funding.  The IMLS funded "Continuing Education to Advance Web Archiving", with Va Tech as the lead institution and several others, including WS-DL, in a supporting role.   With several existing funded projects scheduled to close out this year, plus two additional faculty members, the focus of 2019 will be acquiring additional external funding.

WS-DL annual reviews are also available for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.  Finally, we'd like to thank all those who have complimented our blog, students, and the WS-DL research group in general.  We really appreciate the feedback, some of which we include below.

--Michael

















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