Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Mat Kelly attended and presented at the JCDL 2015 Doctoral Consortium. This is his report.                            Evaluating progress between milestones in a PhD program is difficult due to the inherent open-endedness of research. A means of evaluating whether a student's topic is sound and has merit while still early on in his career is to attend a doctoral consortium. Such an event, as the one held at the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) , has previously provided a platform for WS-DL students (see 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , and others ) to network with faculty and researchers from other institutions as well as observe the approach that other PhD students at the same point in their career use to explain their respective topics. As the wheels have turned, I have showed enough progress in my research for it to be suitable for preliminary presentation at the 2015 JCDL Doctoral Consortium -- so did so this past Sunday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Along with seven

The JCDL 2013 Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work.  Students present their thesis and research plan and a panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of Digital Libraries provides feedback in a constructive atmosphere.  Yasmin AlNaomony and Scott Ainsworth had the privilege of presenting papers at this year's Doctoral Consortium. Scott Ainsworth, Michael Nelson, & Yasmin AlNoamany User Interaction The first session focused on user interaction and was chaired by George Buchanan .  The session began with Erik Choi presenting his work on understanding the motivations behind the questions users ask in Internet Q&A forums.  Prior work in this area has focused on the use an content of Q&A forums; Erik's work focuses on why users ask questions with motivation, expectations, and the relationship between the them. Yasmin AlNaomony pres

On February 21-22 Justin Brunelle ( @justinfbrunelle ) and I ( @machawk1 ) traveled to College Park, Maryland for Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) 2013 . Other members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research (WS-DL) Group at ODU had previously attended this conference (see 2012 Trip Report and 2011 Trip Report ), always previously at Internet Archive in San Francisco , and knew it would be informative and extremely relevant to both of research efforts. We had both been anticipating a few of the presentations, namely the keynotes by Sally Bedell Smith and George Sanger and that Erin Engle ( @erinengle ) promised on the Library of Congress digital preservation blog The Signal . For the sake of preservation, I captured videos of many of the presentations , which I posted on Internet Archive. Each available will be linked inline in this post but for a more original experience, view the videos. As our sole mission at WS-DL is not only to document conferences (ok, admit