Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Fig. 1 (Click image to expand) 366 dots in 2020 - Top news stories for 366 days in 2020. 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. The annotations (and legend) represented by colored dots were assigned semi-automatically . I join the chorus to say 2020 was a year like no other, and shaped by three historic events: the Coronavirus pandemic , the protests surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and the US Presidential elections . According to StoryGraph , in 2018, the top news story was the Kavanaugh hearings . In 2019, it was the Mueller Report . Similar to 2018 and 2019 , we analyzed all news stories collected by StoryGraph at 10-minute intervals every day in 2020, to identify the top news stories of 2020. Recall how we identify top news stories , explained briefly in 365 dots in 201...

Is there a more definitive 2020 academic image than a Zoom window? Despite the challenges of Covid-19's impact on education , the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group had a successful year, doing the best we could under the circumstances.  Most importantly, we graduated three Ph.D. students and one M.S. student, and added to our ranks five incoming graduate students and one instructor.   Students and Faculty We were fortunate enough to graduate three Ph.D. students this year.  Unfortunately, because of Covid all three defenses were over Zoom and we were unable to have our normal post-defense celebratory feast.   Mohamed Aturban defended his dissertation on 2020-07-23 .  Shortly after his defense, he was on the road to Columbia, Missouri where he joined the faculty at Columbia College as an assistant professor of computer science .  Alexander Nwala defended his dissertation on 2020-07-28 (it was a busy week for us!)....

#WebArchiveWednesday began in 2019, first with @TroveAustralia promoting the Australian Web Archive , and then later adopted by the IIPC for World Digital Preservation Day 2019 .  The IIPC generated some momentum for establishing it as a weekly hashtag, and one that the we in the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( @WebSciDL ) have a pretty good record of regularly participating in, starting in about March.  Toward the end of the calendar year, it occurred to me that a year's worth of #WebArchiveWednesday has made for an engaging reading list.   Below I provide an edited list of the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets from or about our group during 2020.  Many are announcing our own software releases, trip reports, defenses, blog posts, and other contributions, but I also made an effort to provide commentary about the web archiving work of others as well.  This list should not be taken as definitive, but rather as an almost weekly selection of whatever ...