Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This year, the 30th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries ( #TPDL2026 ) was held in the beautiful town of Faro, Portugal from September 22-25, 2026. We, Himarsha Jayanetti and Skanda Siva, attended the conference in person to present our paper titled “ Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts ”, co-authored with our advisors, Michele C. Weigle , Michael L. Nelson , and Shuai Hao , all from the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University . InfoVis-DL Workshop The first day of the conference was dedicated to workshops and the Doctoral Consortium. We attended the InfoVis-DL 2026 workshop titled “Information Visualization in Digital Libraries: Multi-modal Applications to Cultural Heritage Collections”, which explored how information visualization can help libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions make complex digital collections more accessible and meaningf...

A screen recording of the JAViD workflow, showing a user uploading dual-participant gaze data and exploring the resulting joint visual attention visualizations. Joint visual attention (JVA) occurs when two or more people focus on the same object or area at the same time. It is an important aspect of social interaction and has been studied in areas such as collaboration, learning, and clinical communication. Researchers use different definitions of JVA depending on the context of their studies. In this project, we define JVA as two or more people looking at the same area of interest at the same time. Advances in eye-tracking technology facilitate the study of JVA by capturing the gaze behavior of multiple people. However, analyzing JVA from multiple eye-tracking streams still involves several steps, including aligning gaze streams, identifying periods of shared attention, and examining the resulting data. These steps can make JVA analysis time-consuming and require specialized technica...