Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Hello Internet and Archivists!      I'm back for another blog post and I'm excited to share some overhauls, updates, and research that I have been working on for the Memento Damage service, previously developed by Dr. Justin Brunelle , Erika Siregar , and Grant Atkins . The project page is still currently running the original project build but I wanted to share some behind-the-scenes updates before we roll out the new build soon! Under the Hood Fig. 1: Homepage for the Memento Damage web service      When I took on this project, there were many components needing update due to age; the code base had been on Python version 2 still as it had sat over the years as Dr. Brunelle and previous students had graduated and moved on to other endeavors. Updating the code base to Python version 3 was one of the top to-do items! Over a lot of time learning the code base and refactoring I was able to clean up and modernize the code a bit thanks to the syntax and language...

Hi, my name is David Calano and I am joining the Web Sciences and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University in Fall 2022. I received my bachelors degree in Computer Science from ODU in 2017 while working in the CS Systems Group and the Tidewater Community College Math Lab. I have been in Arizona teaching Computer Science and Engineering to K-8 students for the past several years and returning to begin my PhD journey here at my alma mater under the supervision of Dr. Nelson . I am interested in information visualization and knowledge representation, data archiving, Web 3.0 (not Web3 ), education, and technology for social good. Outside of computers I love playing D&D, backpacking, camping, and the outdoors, punk rock, and my cat Poptart! McAfee Knobb, Virginia Henry Rollins wants to know if you have time to discuss web archiving My first two PhD courses CS 532: Web Science and CS 895: Web Archiving Forensics mark a great starting point to dive into the past...

Most GitHub users are aware of *.github.io as a GitHub hosted website. But, before there was *.github.io, ( https://elescamilla.github.io ) there was *.github.com (https://elescamilla.github.com) that had the exact same functionality. What caused the change? On April 5, 2013, GitHub released a statement that they would be deprecating *.github.com for security reasons. In the post, they said that "all traffic will be redirected to the new *.github.io location indefinitely,  so you won't have to change any links". However, on January 29, 2021, they released an updated statement that they would stop redirecting *github.com to *.github.io starting April 15, 2021 to further address security concerns. They recommended that users "remove any external references to *.github.com". To encourage users to update any external links, they scheduled two " brown out " dates and notified users of the upcoming change. But... In most situations, it is difficult to modi...

Starting in Fall 2021, I've had the opportunity to work on the  CoSAI Project  under the guidance of  Dr. Martin Klein ,  Dr. Michael Nelson , and  Dr. Michele Weigle . The CoSAI Project is working to preserve web-based scholarship including source code. The goal of the project is to make the archival process more accessible to institutions by creating a curation workflow to facilitate the process. As part of the project, we wanted to find a set of code repository URIs that were referenced in scholarly publications. To do this, we decided to extract URIs from PDFs in the  arXiv  corpus which now includes more than 2 million papers . We focused on a corpus of 1.56 million PDFs from April 2007 to November 2021. During an internship at LANL in Summer 2021 , Yasith Jayawardana created code that Robustifies URIs found in PDFs. Part of the code extracts URIs found in PDFs using the PyPDFium2 and PyPDF2 to extract annotated URIs and URIs in the text, respec...

We are happy to announce that our new collaboration between the New York University (NYU) Division of Libraries , the Research Library's Prototyping Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) , the University of Pittsburgh ’s Computer Science Department , and the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WDSL) Research Group has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with an amount of $520,000. The two-year project titled “Collaborative Software Archiving for Institutions (CoSAI)” is led by co-PIs Vicky Rampin (Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility, NYU) and Martin Klein (Research Scientist, LANL), in collaboration with the wilkie from the Open Curation of Computation and Metadata (OCCAM) initiative at the University of Pittsburgh and WSDL’s Michael L. Nelson and Michele Weigle from ODU. In addition, we are thrilled to welcome Talya Cooper and Emily Escamilla to the CoSAI team. CoSAI will focus on institutional approaches to provide machine-re...