Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This year, the 30th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries ( #TPDL2026 ) was held in the beautiful town of Faro, Portugal from September 22-25, 2026. We, Himarsha Jayanetti and Skanda Siva, attended the conference in person to present our paper titled “ Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts ”, co-authored with our advisors, Michele C. Weigle , Michael L. Nelson , and Shuai Hao , all from the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University . InfoVis-DL Workshop The first day of the conference was dedicated to workshops and the Doctoral Consortium. We attended the InfoVis-DL 2026 workshop titled “Information Visualization in Digital Libraries: Multi-modal Applications to Cultural Heritage Collections”, which explored how information visualization can help libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions make complex digital collections more accessible and meaningf...

In collaboration with Dr. Alexander Nwala at William & Mary and Dr. Sawood Alam at the Internet Archive , we ( Himarsha R. Jayanetti , Dr. Michael L. Nelson , and Dr. Michele C. Weigle ) at the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group at Old Dominion University received an award of $750,000 in federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) beginning in August 2026. The award supports the project, “CiteCast: Linking US local & national television news to cited web resources” .  The project focuses on identifying and preserving web resources referenced in archived U.S. local and national television news. Television news frequently points viewers to websites, social media posts, and other online resources, but those resources can change or disappear over time. The goal of this is to help connect these references in television archives with the corresponding web resources and preserve them for future research. Figure 1: Example TV ...

In the Spring 2026 semester at Old Dominion University (ODU), I taught CS 450 (Undergrad) / CS 550 (Graduate): Database Concepts . The course was fully online, with synchronous live Zoom sessions held twice a week. The attendance was not mandatory but strongly encouraged. All lectures were recorded and made available for students to access whenever needed. Figure 1: Canvas course page for CS 450/550: Database Concepts Through this blog post, I want to share my experience of teaching a senior-level undergraduate/graduate course for the first time, the behind-the-scenes realities of course preparation through to the end of the course, and how student feedback actively shaped the course as it progressed.  Since the course had been taught previously by other instructors, materials were already available, which made things easier. Rather than building everything from scratch, I started by copying over the existing course structure and then carefully updating it to align with the current...