Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Everyday we create more and more digital files that record our lives.  We take selfies (with and without our loved ones).  We record our baby's first step.  We take pictures of things that we have or would like to have.  The number of digital file and artifacts we create grows and grows and the places where we can store them seem to have almost infinite capacity.  Smart phones with 64Gigabytes of storage, could hold almost 20,000 MP3 files (roughly 1,000 hours of listening time, or about 6 months of listening 8 hours a day).  Amateur cameras can have the same amount of storage, and depending on image size and frames per second can store days of continuous recordings or about 500,000 still images.  We can and are creating more digital artifacts than we can manage.  Being able to create so much, means we don't care about what we create.  We create because it is easy.  We create because it is fun.  We create because we have a new toy.  We create because we can.  There is a signi

If you recall, way back in 2012, Kalpesh Padia (now at N.C. State under Christopher Healey ) and Yasmin AlNoamany ( @yasmina_anwar ) presented "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It", a paper presented at JCDL 2012 , which was the product of Dr. Michele C. Weigle's ( @weiglemc ) pair of infovis-related courses at Old Dominion University (ODU): CS825 - Information Visualization and CS895 - Applied Visual Analytics . Like Kalpesh and Yasmin, I have turned a semester project into a conference submission with a poster/demo accepted to IEEE VIS 2013: Graph-Based Navigation of a Box Office Prediction System . The impetus for this strangely out-of-topic (for this blog's theme) submission has roots in the IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge, a competition where a large data set is supplied to contestants and a meaningful visual representation is created with each submission. Both Kalpesh and I had previously participated in the VAST

On October 2-5, I was thrilled to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) , the world's largest gathering for women in computing, and meet so many amazing and inspiring women in computing. This year, GHC was held in Minneapolis, MN. It is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology , which was founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney in 1994 to bring together research and career interests of women in computing and encourage the participation of women in computing. GHC was held for the first time in 1994 in Washington DC. The theme of the conference this year was "Think Big - Drive Forward". There were many sessions and workshops that targeted academics and business. The Computing Research Association Committee on Women in Computing ( CRA-W ),  offered sessions targeted towards academics. I had a chance to attend Graduate Cohort Workshop last April, which was held in Boston, MA, and created a blog post about it. The fi

Last week LANL released Memento for Chrome , an extension that adds Memento capability for Chrome browsers.  It represents such a leap in capability and speed that the prior MementoFox (Memento for FireFox) add-on should be considered deprecated.  It's not just a FireFox vs. Chrome thing either; Memento for Chrome features a subtle change in how it interacts with the past and present.  MementoFox had a toggle switch for present vs. Time Travel mode that would trap and modify all outbound requests , from the current page and all subsequent pages until turned off, to go from the form of: http://example.com/index.html to: http://mementoproxy.lanl.gov/aggr/timegate/http://example.com/index.html This involved some complicated logic to determine when you were getting a memento (i.e., archived web entity) vs. something from the live web.  When you factored in native Memento archives vs. proxied Memento archives, things could get hairy (see the 2011 Code4Lib paper for a (dat

Earlier this year, we were awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for our project "Archive What I See Now": Bringing Institutional Web Archiving Tools to the Individual Researcher. We were invited to attend the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors' Meeting in early October, but due to the government shutdown, the meeting was cancelled.  Here I'll give the quick overview of the project that I'd planned for that meeting.  (Mat Kelly has already posted a nice description of the tools we've been developing, WARCreate and WAIL, at http://bit.ly/wc-wail .) The slides I'd prepared are below: "Archive What I See Now" - NEH ODH overview from Michele Weigle Our project is focused on helping people archive web pages. Since much of our cultural heritage is now published on the web, we want to make sure that important pages are archived for the future. Since 1996, the Internet Archive and other archiving services ha

I attended the 2013 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) Conference on September 22-26 in Valletta, Malta .  Although I've had papers at several of the prior TPDL (known as ECDL prior to 2011) conferences , I think this is the first one I've personally attended since ECDL 2005 in Austria.  Normally I prefer to send students to present their papers, but this year we had five full papers accepted, so I could not afford to send all the students and I went in their stead.  An unfortunate side effect of having so many papers is that between preparation and my own presentations I was unable to see as much of the conference as I would have liked. The conference began with Herbert Van de Sompel and I giving a tutorial about ResourceSync .  Attendees registered for all tutorials and were free to attend whichever one they preferred.  We had as many as ten people in ours at one point, but more importantly we had some key people present who will be implementing Resource