2016-01-02: Review of WS-DL's 2015

.@WebSciDL reunion at #jcdl2015 - 4 phd alumni, 3 phd students, 2 profs! pic.twitter.com/kA8CUYtZCW

— Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) June 23, 2015

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a terrific 2015, marked by four new student members, one Ph.D. defense, and two large research grants.  In many ways it was even better than 2014 and 2013.

We had fewer students graduate or advance their status this year, but last year was unusually productive.  We did add four new students, as well as graduate a PhD student, an MS student, and had two other students advance their status:

• Hany SalahEldeen defended his Ph.D. on May 5, 2015 and then took a cross country motorcycle trip on his way to join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.  
• Shawn Jones defended his M.S. thesis on March 23, 2015 and then joined LANL as a Graduate Research Assistant in the fall of 2015.  Shawn will continue his PhD work while @ LANL, working with Herbert Van de Sompel.
• Sawood Alam passed the research ability exam.
• Kayla Fox joined WS-DL and then passed her breadth exam on December 9, 2015.  
• We also added: Dan Milanko (PhD), John Berlin (BS), and Erik Jensen (BS).  John and Erik will be completing their undergraduate degrees and continuing their graduate work with us in 2016. 

Hany's defense saw us continue the WS-DL tradition of the post-PhD luncheon.

We had 16 publications in 2015, which was about the same as 2014 (15) but down from 2013's impressive 22 publications.  This year we had:

• Three full papers and one poster at JCDL 2015.  Lulwah Alkwai won best student paper for "How Well Are Arabic Websites Archived?", and Justin Brunelle split the best poster award (with WS-DL alumnus Ahmed AlSum) for "Mobile Mink: Merging Mobile and Desktop Archived Webs", which is based on his advising of HS student intern, Wes Jordan.
• Four full papers at TPDL 2015.  
• One paper at Hypertext 2015.  Although none of us (Scott, Michael, & Herbert) were able to attend, VA Beach-based Ted Goranson also had a paper there and was kind enough to present the slides on our behalf.
• Hany had a paper at AAAI 2015, based on his internship at WING with Dr. Min-Yen Kan.
• Justin had one paper at iPRES 2015.
• One tech report, one D-Lib Magazine article, and three articles in the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL).  Of the IJDL articles, one is based on Justin's JCDL 2014 best student paper, one is based on Chuck's JCDL 2014 best paper, and the third was an original submission for which Mat was the lead student.

Next year we won't have this kind of showing at JCDL 2016 because Michele is one of the program co-chairs:



In addition to the JCDL, TPDL, and iPRES conferences listed above, we traveled to and presented at ten conferences, workshops, or professional meetings that do not have formal proceedings:

• I attended the CNI Fall 2015 Membership Meeting.  
• Yasmin attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.  This was Yasmin's third acceptance to this conference!
• Yasmin and Sawood traveled to Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal University in Potsdam, Germany at the invitation of Dr. Michael Herzog.
• Yasmin met with members of L3S and the Internet Archive in San Francisco.  
• Sawood, Mat, Lulwah, Michele and I attended JCDL 2015 (which also included the Doctoral Consortium and the Web Archiving & Digital Libraries workshop) We also had several WS-DL alumni show up as well: Hany, Ahmed, Martin Klein, and Joan Smith (see the picture at the top of this post).  
• Mat and Michele attended the Web Archiving Collaboration meeting. 
• Sawood and I attended the IIPC General Assembly
• Mat presented at the Virginia Space Grant Consortium Student Research Conference.   
• Michele attended the Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC)
• Justin attended the Winter 2015 Federal Cloud Computing Summit

We were also fortunate to host Michael Herzog for the spring 2015 semester:



As well as Herbert Van de Sompel for an extended colloquium / planning visit:

.@hvdsomp lecturing at @WebSciDL pic.twitter.com/vh3sW12Elq

— Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) August 5, 2015

We also released (or updated) a number of software packages, services, and format definitions:

• Alexander Nwala created: 
• What Did It Look Like -- a Tumblr blog (with automated Twitter submission) that creates animations of screen shots of archived web pages through time.  
• I Can Haz Memento -- a Twitter bot that pushes URLs in tweets with the hashtag "#icanhazmemento" into web archives.
• Sawood released:
• CDXJ -  a proposed serialization of CDX files (among other formats) in JSON format (based on his discussions with Ilya Kreymer) 
• MemGator - A Go-based Memento aggregator (used by Ilya in his excellent emulation service oldweb.today).
• Shawn, working with LANL colleagues, released the py-memento-client Python library.
• Wes and Justin released "Mobile Mink", an Android Memento enabled client.  
• Mat has continued to update the Mink Chrome extension (github, Chrome store). 

Our coverage in the popular press continued:

• I was quoted in the New Yorker, Aeon Magazine, and El Confidencial (a Spanish news magazine).  
• Rashad McDowell, of ODU's Mace and Crown, did features on me, Michele, and our "Archive What I See Now" project.

We were fortunate to receive two significant research grants this year, totaling nearly $1M:

• "Combining Social Media Storytelling With Web Archives", IMLS, $468,618
• "Increasing the Value of Existing Web Archives", NSF, $481,780

Thanks to all who made 2015 a great year!  We are looking forward to 2016!

-- Michael

This is how I evaluate drafts now. The one on the left isn't ready yet. pic.twitter.com/vjTeYkB63C

— Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) February 6, 2015