Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group's 2014 was even better than our 2013 .  First, we graduated two PhD students and had many other students advance their status: Ahmed AlSum defended his Ph.D. on February 26, 2014 and joined the Stanford University Libraries after his defense.  It was Ahmed that started the WSDL tradition of the successful candidate providing the celebratory lunch (shown in the above picture, as well as several photos from our new WSDL Flickr Photostream ).  Chuck Cartledge defended his Ph.D. on May 30, 2014 (he already had a position with Fulcrum ).  Since Chuck finished after Ahmed, he was responsible for lunch as well. Justin Brunelle passed his candidacy exam .   Yasmin AlNoamany passed her candidacy exam . Hany SalahEldeen passed his candidacy exam . Mohamed Aturban passed his breadth exam . Louis Nguyen passed his breadth exam .   Corren McCoy passed her breadth exam.  Alexan...

Photo credit to my friend  Mona El Mahdy I was thrilled and humbled for the second time to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing ( GHC ) 2014, the world’s largest gathering for technologists women. GHC 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. The twentieth anniversary of GHC was held in Phoenix, Arizona on October 8-10, 2014. This year, GHC has almost doubled the number of women who have research and business interests from the last year to be 8,000 women from about 67 countries and about 900 organizations to get inspired, gain expertise, get connected, and have fun. Aida Ghazizadeh from the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University also was awarded travel scholarships to attend this year's GHC. I hope ODU wi...

(with apologies to Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, and Dr. Seuss) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, ..." (A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens). At the end of this part of my journey; it is time to reflect on how I got here, and what the future may hold. Looking back, I am here because of answering two simple questions.  One from a man who is no longer here, one from a man who still poses new and interesting questions.  Along the way, I've formed a few questions of my own. The first question was posed by my paternal uncle, Bertram Winston.  Uncle Bert was a classic type A personality.  Everything in his life was o...

On Monday (Sep 15), Michael and I attended the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors' Meeting at their new location in the Constitution Center in Washington, DC. We were invited based on our "Archive What I See Now" project being funded as a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant . There were two main goals of the meeting: 1) provide administrative information and advice to project directors and 2) allow project directors to give a 3 minute overview of their project to the general public. The morning was devoted the first goal.  One highlight for me was ODH Director Brett Bobley 's welcome in which he talked a bit about the history of the NEH (NEH's 50th anniversary is coming up in 2015).  The agency is currently in the process of digitizing their historical documents, including records of all of the grants that have been awarded (originally stored on McBee Key Sort cards ). He also mentioned the recent article "The Rise of the Machines...

(or how I learned to embrace the new) I am reaching the end of this part of my professional, academic, and personal life.  It is time to reflect and consider how I got here. The trail ahead. When I started, I thought that I knew the path, the direction, and the work that it would take.  I was wrong.  The path was rugged, steep, and covered with roots and stones that lay in wait to trip the unwary.  The direction was not straight forward.  At times I wasn't sure how to set my compass, and which way to steer.  In the end, there was more work than I thought in the beginning.  But the end is nigh.  The path has been long.  At times the was direction confusing.  The work seemed never ending.  This is a story of how I got to the end, using a little help from "a friend" at the end of this post. Bringing the initially disparate disciplines of graph theory, digital preservation, and emergent behavior together to solve a particular...

Mat Kelly and Dr. Michael L. Nelson travel to Washington, DC and both report on their current research as well as be made aware of others' work in the field.                            On July 22 and 23, 2014, Dr. Michael Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ) and I ( @machawk1 ) attended Digital Preservation 2014 in Washington, DC. This was my fourth consecutive NDIIPP ( @ndiipp ) / NDSA ( @ndsa2 ) meeting (see trip reports from Digital Preservation 2011 , 2012 , 2013 ). With the largest attendance yet (300+) and compressed into two days, the schedule was jam-packed with interesting talks. Per usual, videos for most of the presentations are included inline below. Day One Micah Altman ( @drmaltman ) led the presentations with information about the NDSA and asked, regarding Amazon claiming reliability of 99.99999999999% for uptime, "What do the eleve...