Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group continued to grow in 2019! In this post we recap the highlights of calendar year 2019, including two Ph.D. graduates, seven incoming Ph.D. students, and a new assistant professor.  But don't wait another year to find out what we're up to now -- follow us now on Twitter ( @WebSciDL ) to keep up to date. Students and faculty We are the most proud of the fact that we graduated two Ph.D. students this year: Lulwah Alkwai defended her dissertation on 2019-04-04 .  Shortly after her defense, Lulwah headed back home in Saudi Arabia to resume her position at the University of Hail , now as an assistant professor.   Mat Kelly defended his dissertation on 2019-05-07 .  After selling his house in Portsmouth, Mat headed north to become an assistant professor at Drexel University and is recruiting his own Ph.D. students . Congratulations to @LulwahMA on a successful PhD defense! @WebSciDL @od...

Fig. 1 (Click on image to expand) 365 dots in 2019 - News stories for 365 days in 2019. 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 represents the average degree of the GCC. In March 2019 I published " 365 dots in 2018 " where I presented the top stories for each day in 2018 according to StoryGraph . Now that 2019 is over, it is natural to ask  what were the top news stories of 2019? News organizations will often publish "the year's top stories" or "year in review" (e.g., CNN , CBS , FoxNews ), but the selection criteria is not always made explicit. The closest to a selection criteria I have seen from news organizations is the presentation of their  top most viewed (or most popular) news stories. But this criteria is not accessible to ordinary users who cannot access the private traffic sta...

Mat Kelly has received his PhD. This is the Final Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                 ...