Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Internet Archive & Libyan newspapers logos Colonel Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years after taking power from King Idris in a 1969 military coup . In August 2011, his regime was toppled in the so-called Arab Spring. For more than four decades, media in Libya was highly politicized to support Gaddafi’s regime and secure his power. After the Libyan revolution (in 2011), media became freed from the tight control of the government, and we have seen the establishment of tens if not hundreds of new media organizations. Here is an overview of one side, newspapers, of Gaddafi’s propaganda machine: 71 newspapers and magazines  All monitored and published by the Libyan General Press Corporation (LGPC)  The Jamahiriya News Agency (JANA) was the main source of domestic news  No real political function other than to polish the regime’s image  Publish information provided by the regime  The following are the Libyan most well-known newspapers which are all publ...

The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media . Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution . Several books were even published documenting the 18 days . All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0 . As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10% of this digital content is already gone. Websites like Twitter , YouTube , Facebook , Storify , 1000Memories , Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or video...

So far this year all three of the prediction algorithms are 68% correct straight up. This is better than the predictions of most of the NFL "experts" such as the guys at ESPN . Last year we ended up right below 70% correct as well. Breaking the 70% barrier over the season seems to be rather hard to do as seen on the Prediction Tracker . Looking into the statistics of those games reveals some interesting information. In the majority of those games, the losing team had better box scores but still lost the game. We had thought that incorporating the betting line data this year would have had impact but the accuracy of the straight up predictions is not significantly better than last year. The season isn't over yet and anything can happen so here are the predictions for week 15. Favorite Spread Underdog Discrete Pagerank DAL 7 at TB DAL DAL at NYG 10 WAS NYG NYG ...

Week 14 of the 2011 NFL season is upon us. Talk of play-off teams and Superbowl probabilities fill the airwaves even more than Christmas music. Sitting in traffic on the drive home from work tonight I was listening to a few on-air personalities discussing Green Bay and New England for the Superbowl. Green Bay has already clinched a playoff berth and many people would say they are headed to the Superbowl this year. The comment that caught my attention was that the defense for both teams was terrible this year and the only reason they were doing well this year is that their offenses were so good that they could "outscore their mistakes". This led me to think about the Colts without Peyton Manning this year. For the past 3 or 4 years the Colts with Manning as their quarterback have dominated the sport. It would seem that they built the entire team around Manning. The Colts would run up the score on offense and then the opposing team would be forced to attempt to pass often jus...

Thursday Night Football, this week the NY Jets play at Denver. The Jets have a number of players on the injured list this week. Even with those injuries all three of our algorithms picked the Jets to win on Thursday. The Jets injury list is not as bad as some of the other teams. Philadelphia's quarterback, Vick has two broken ribs and has not been at practice all week. Kansas City's quarterback Matt Cassel underwent hand surgery and will probably be out for the rest of the season. A weakness of our algorithms is that they are heavily based on this years performance to date. A major injury to an important player that may or may not have an impact of game performance is not really taken into account. That is one of the reasons we have incorporated the Line data this year. Hoping that the "Collective Intelligence" of the crowd would help to point out teams that may not perform differently. Favorite Spread Underdog Discrete ...

Our neural network predictor was 68% correct straight up this past week but overall our results were not awe inspiring. Two of the games that almost everyone got wrong were the Eagles-Bills and Seahawks-Giants games. In both games the favorite lost and one of the crucial stats was interceptions. Michael Vick of the Eagles threw four interceptions and Eli Manning threw three for the Giants. This is completely out of character for either of the quarterbacks. So far this year our Support Vector Machine (SVM) predictor has tracked the favorites very closely. With the addition of the line data this year, the line value has driven the output of the SVM. Ignoring the Line values, passing efficiency and turnovers forced by the defense have been two of the most dominant statistics. Predictions for week 6: Favorite Spread Underdog Discrete Pagerank At GB 14.5 STL GB GB At PIT 9.5 JAX PIT PIT PHI ...

Week 4 performance was rather pleasing. Straight up and against the spread were 80% and 75% correct. Buffalo lost with that last minute field goal and as to why Philadelphia fell apart in the second half and lost a 20 point lead has been the subject of numerous commentator's discussions. Hopefully the predictions continue to perform at this level but pessimism indicates that they will regress to the mean.  Week 5 of the NFL season means the commencement of bye weeks. This week's teams on bye are the Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns, Dallas Cowboys, Miami Dolphins, St. Louis Rams and Washington Redskins. For comparison purposes we have included one of the better performing algorithms from the past two years. The PageRank algorithm that we modified to indicate strong teams averaged 68% for straight up predictions over the past two years. A more detailed explanation is provided in one of our previous posts . The predictions for Week 5: Favorite Line Unde...

The 2011 NFL season is underway and we are ready to put some of our improved algorithms to the test. Last year we primarily used box score data for our predictions. This resulted in adequate performance but nothing spectacular. This year we are increasing the collective intelligence quotient in our algorithm by incorporating betting line data and line movement. The purpose of the betting line is to make the sportsbooks money by splitting the betting population in half. The line will move as a result of betting pressure presented by the betting population. e.g. The favorite team is favored by 5 points. Many bettors may feel that the favorite team is not that good and place bets on the underdog. With an unbalanced wager profile the sportsbook has the potential to lose money so they will move the bet line until the incoming bets are equal on each side. This movement is a form of collective intelligence of the betting population. Another change this year is that in addition to choosing...

I am very happy to write about the successful completion of my dissertation work in the Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University . My dissertation is titled "Using the Web Infrastructure for Real Time Recovery of Missing Web Pages" and, as the title suggests, it makes several contributions in the areas of digital data preservation and information retrieval. In brief, the dissertation evaluates multiple techniques for a "just-in-time" approach to web page preservation. We, for example, investigate the suitability of lexical signatures and web page titles to rediscover missing content . These two methods are based on old copies of the pages provided by the Memento framework. We also analyze the performance of tags that users have created to annotate pages as well as the most salient terms derived from a page's link neighborhood as methods to find missing pages. On the practical side, the dissertation introduces Synchronicity , a Firefox add-on...

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group is offering two classes for the fall 2011 semester. CS 895 Web-Based Information Retrieval will be offered on Tuesdays, 4:20-7:00 in room 2120 of the ECS building. This class will use the recent Croft, Metzler & Strohman book as the required text, and the Manning, Ragahavan, & Schutze book as the recommended text. By choosing the former book as the primary guide for the course, we are intentionally provided a strong engineering component to the class (i.e., a level of coding and development is expected) as opposed to just a theoretical exploration of information retrieval. CS 751/851 Introduction to Digital Libraries is not a prerequisite, but it would help to be familiar with the material covered in that class. Dr. Weigle will be teaching CS 795/895 Information Visualization on Thursdays, 9:30-12:15 in room 2120 of the ECS building. This class is a follow-on to the CS 796/896 Visual Analytics Seminar from last ...

The NDSA/NDIIPP ( @ndiipp ) Partner Meetup took place July 19-21 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Technical and non-technical joined together to form an aggregated consortium of archivists, librarians, digital media specialists and concerned parties. Three representatives from the ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries group attended to make archivists aware of tools they had developed to accomplish the common goal of web archiving. WS-DL’s Comtributions to the NDSA/NDIPP Meetup Mat Kelly presented the Mozilla Firefox add-on Archive Facebook to a breakout group of presentations specifically targeting web archiving. The redesigned and re-architected add-on allows a user to archive the content of his/her Facebook account with the result being truly WYSIWYG versus Facebook’s native offerings of a content dump.   NDIIPP/NDSA 2011 - Archive Facebook from Mat Kelly Vivens Ndatinya showed the workings of a tool he is currently bui...