Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

As part of my 9-to-5 job at The MITRE Corporation , I lead several STEM outreach efforts in the local academic community. One of our partnerships with the New Horizon's Governor's School for Science and Technology  pairs high school seniors with professionals in STEM careers. Wes Jordan has been working with me since October 2014 as part of this program and for his senior mentorship project as a requirement for graduation from the Governor's School. Wes has developed Mobile Mink (soon to be available in the Google Play store). Inspired by Mat Kelly's Mink add-on for Chrome, Wes adapted the functionality to an Android application. This blog post discusses the motivation for and operation of Mobile Mink. Motivation The growth of the mobile web has encouraged web archivists to focus on ensuring its thorough archiving. However, the mobile URIs are not as prevalent in the archives as their non-mobile (or as we will refer to them:  desktop ) URIs. This is apparent when...

I attended the 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting in Montgomery, AL on November 18.  The meeting attendees are representatives from Archive-It partners with interests ranging from archiving webpages about art and music to archiving government webpages.  (Presentation slides are now available on the Archive-It wiki .)  This is ODU's third consecutive Partners Meeting (see trip reports from 2012  and  2013 ). The morning program was focused on presentations from partners who are building collections.  Here's a brief overview of each of those. Penny Baker and Susan Roeper from the Clark Art Institute talked about their experience in archiving the 2013 Venice Biennale international art exhibition ( Archive-It collection ) and plans for the upcoming exhibition.  Their collection includes exhibition catalogs, monographs, and press releases about the event.  The material also includes a number of videos (mainly from vimeo), which Arch...

UPDATE: Download the latest version of Mink here . The goal of the Memento project is to provide a tighter integration between the past and current web.    There are a number of clients now that provide this functionality, but they remain silent about the archived page until the user remembers to invoke them (e.g., by right-clicking on a link). We have created another approach based on persistently reminding the user just how well archived (or not) are the pages they visit.  The Chrome extension Mink (short for Minkowski Space ) queries all the public web archives (via the Memento aggregator) in the background and will display the number of mementos (that is, the number of captures of the web page) available at the bottom right of the page.  Selecting the indicator allows quick access to the mementos through a dropdown.  Once in the archives, returning to the live web is as simple as clicking the "Back to Live Web" button. For the case where there are...

Mat Kelly, Justin F. Brunelle and Dr. Michael L. Nelson travel to London, UK to report on the Digital Libraries 2014 Conference.                            On September 9th through 11th, 2014, Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Justin ( @justinfbrunelle ), and I ( @machawk1 ) attending the Digital Libraries 2014 conference (a composite of the JCDL (see trip reports for 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ) and TPDL (see trip reports for 2013 and 2012 ) conferences this year) in London, England. Prior to the conference, Justin and I attended the DL2014 Doctoral Consortium , which occurred on September 8th. The main conference on September 9th opened with George Buchanan ( @GeorgeRBuchanan ) indicating that this year's conference was a combination of both TPDL and JCDL from previous years. With the first digital libraries conference being in 1994, this year marke...

On Monday (Sep 15), Michael and I attended the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors' Meeting at their new location in the Constitution Center in Washington, DC. We were invited based on our "Archive What I See Now" project being funded as a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant . There were two main goals of the meeting: 1) provide administrative information and advice to project directors and 2) allow project directors to give a 3 minute overview of their project to the general public. The morning was devoted the first goal.  One highlight for me was ODH Director Brett Bobley 's welcome in which he talked a bit about the history of the NEH (NEH's 50th anniversary is coming up in 2015).  The agency is currently in the process of digitizing their historical documents, including records of all of the grants that have been awarded (originally stored on McBee Key Sort cards ). He also mentioned the recent article "The Rise of the Machines...