Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Mixed language blocks on a memento of a Twitter timeline. Highlighted with blue colored box for Portuguese, orange for English, and red for Urdu. Dotted border indicates the template present in the original HTML response while blocks with solid borders indicate lazily loaded content. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that Twitter is a multi-lingual website, supporting 47 different international languages ? How about if I were to tell you that a usual Twitter timeline page can contain tweets in whatever languages the owner of the handle chooses to tweet, but can also show navigation bar and various sidebar blocks in many different languages simultaneously, now surprised? Well, while it makes no sense, it may actually happen in web archives when a memento of a timeline is accessed as shown in Figure 1. Spoiler alert! Cookies are to be blamed, once again . Last month, I was investigating a real life version of " Ron Burgundy will read anything on the

Fig. 1: News stories for 365 days in 2018. Each dot represents the average degree of the Giant Connected Component (GCC) with the largest average degree across all the 144 story graphs for a given day. The x-axis represents time, the y-axis represent the average degree of the selected GCC. Click to expand image. There was no shortage of big news headlines in 2018. Amidst this abundance, a natural question is what were the top news stories of 2018? There are multiple lists from different news organizations that present candidate top stories in 2018 such as  CNN's most popular stories and videos of 2018 , and  The year in review: Top news stories of 2018 month by month  from CBS. Even though such lists from respectable news organizations pass the "seems right test," they mostly present the top news stories without presenting an explanation for their process. In other words, they often do not state why some story made the list and why another did not make the list. We