Posts

Showing posts from November, 2021

2021-11-22: Mohan Krishna Sunkara (Computer Science PhD Student)

Image
              Hello, my name is Mohan Krishna Sunkara . I am a PhD student in the Computer Science department. I am a member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group working under the supervision of Dr. Vikas Ashok. I joined Old Dominion University in fall 2021. My research interest includes computer vision, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and deep learning. I have graduated from Manipal Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Technology in information technology and a Master of Technology in computer science and engineering. During my master’s degree, I worked as an R&D intern in HP Hewlett-Packard Research and Development in Bangalore, India. I used to work on HP printers where I learnt about operating systems, networking and come across various machine learning and deep learning models. My goal is to add intelligence to the HP printers so that they can find solutions for its their problem thereby reducing human work.  I also had the op

2021-11-19: HTML Meta Redirects Considered Harmful for Card Generation

Image
A Twitter card often appears in a tweet when a user shares a URL. We found that if the page being shared on Twitter contains an HTML META redirect, Twitter will not follow it to gather information for the card. On October 26, we (Mat Kelly and Shawn Jones) were confused by a Tweet from Tamara Munzner  ( memento ) about IEEE VIS 2021 . We were both perplexed because the card in the tweet displays the text "IEEE VIS 2020 " instead of "IEEE VIS 2021 ". A screenshot of Tamara Munzner 's tweet promoting IEEE VIS 2021. We use a screenshot instead of an embed in case Twitter fixes this issue. As mentioned in Shawn's recent ACM/IEEE JCDL 2021 and ACM Web Science 2021 papers, his dissertation , and  Twitter's Card documentation , whenever a web page is shared on Twitter, Twitter searches for META tags inside the page. If these META tags have values for the fields twitter:card , twitter:title , twitter:description , and twitter:image , then Twitter will use

2021-11-18: ODU CS 2021 Trick-or-Research Event Trip Report

Image
The  Department of Computer Science (CS)  at Old Dominion University (ODU) held its 3rd Trick-or-Research event, which was organized by Dr. Sampath and his goblins in the NIRDS lab.  This year, the event was held virtually via the Gather platform.   Different groups and labs in the CS department customized their own rooms in Gather.town with demos and posters surrounded by spooky décor.  Attendees created their own avatars before venturing out to explore the town.  Some physically dressed for the occasion while others took advantage of a virtual wardrobe courtesy of Snap Camera .   The Gather.town virtual platform was a great choice for this event.  It allowed users to see only those individuals in the same room and allowed avatars in close range to have natural conversations via video chat.  I will tell you more about my own adventure through the different locations in Gather.town and what you missed. The CS Trick-or-Research-2021 event is happening now on the Gather platform! You

2021-11-18: Emily Escamilla (Computer Science PhD Student)

Image
My name is Emily Escamilla. I joined the  Web Science and Digital Libraries  (WS-DL) research group at  Old Dominion University  as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2021. In high school, I was a student at the  Governor's School for Science and Technology . I did my senior mentorship project with  Dr. Justin Brunelle , a WS-DL and ODU alumni. Dr. Brunelle introduced me to the world of web archiving and I've been hooked ever since.  I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from  Liberty University  with a dual focus in software engineering and web and mobile development. During my time in undergrad, I interned with  The MITRE Corporation  as a software developer intern. I was a part of projects involved in creating user interfaces that allow the user to rapidly understand large amounts of data. My time at The MITRE Corporation, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), also helped me see the power of research in the field of Computer Science, a large reason I

2021-11-03: The Return of SHARI -- Bringing News and Web Archive Storytelling Together Again

Image
A SHARI story covering the biggest news story of October 25, 2010 , involving revelations about Facebook. Follow @StormyArchives on Twitter for daily updates on yesterday's biggest news story. SHARI is back. Each day, the Dark and Stormy Archives Project will apply the SHARI process to gather the news articles for the previous day's top stories and present them as a social media story, as seen above. Each card in the story links to a memento of a news article in a web archive. Each story will be shared via the @StormyArchives social media account. SHARI depends on Dr. Alexander Nwala's  StoryGraph service. We thank the Internet Archive for helping us restore StoryGraph, thus making SHARI possible once again. SHARI uses StoryGraph and the DSA Toolkit to apply all of the storytelling processes from the five-process storytelling model. SHARI satisfies all of the processes from our five-process storytelling model. As shown above, SHARI uses StoryGraph to select exemplar

2021-11-03: WS-DL Celebration of #InternetArchive25

Image
source: anniversary.archive.org The Internet Archive celebrated its 25th anniversary two weeks ago ( #InternetArchive25 ).  IA began in late 1996, although its web archive, the Wayback Machine, was not publicly released until 2001 .  While there is a lot more to the IA than just the Wayback Machine, our research group's celebration was primarily about web archives, with the 9/11 TV news archive and Flash games collection also appearing.   We asked the members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( WSDL ) to reflect about the personal impact of web archiving on their lives.  This deviates from our regular posts of technical analysis and commentary, though a bit of that sneaks in (we can't help ourselves), and is instead about web archives applied to areas of personal interests and stories.  We also did this five years ago for IA's 20th anniversary celebration , in the before times , when celebrations were in person and not primarily online.  WS-DL members blo

2021-11-03: Playing Archived Flash Games From ArmorGames.com Using the Internet Archive’s Flash Collections and the Wayback Machine

Image
When I was in middle school and high school, I used to play browser games from websites like ArmorGames.com , AddictingGames.com , and CrazyMonkeyGames.com . The browser games that I used to play were Flash games. Since Flash is no longer supported I wanted to learn some of the different ways that someone can play Flash games today.  For the Internet Archive’s 25th anniversary , I wanted to describe some of th e different ways that the Internet Archive 's Flash collections and the Wayback Machine can be used to play Flash games. For this blog post I will focus on Flash games from ArmorGames.com . ArmorGames.com was first archived by the Wayback Machine during 2005. I used the Wayback Machine to go through the years 2005–2021 for ArmorGames.com so that I could find different URL structures that can be used to find archived Flash games, access a game's web page, or download the SWF file for a game. I will also describe some problems that can occur when trying to play archived