Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I have the distinction, or dis-honor, of having all of my active federal research grants terminated by the current administration. None of the grants were researching anything especially controversial, but they were all funded by programs that have been effectively shut down. To add insult to injury, the termination letters each stated that our research project no longer “effectuates” the goals of the funding program and, in one case, "no longer serves the interest of the United States," which feels a bit harsh. Further, we were given no advance notice -- the terminations were effective on the same day we received notice (one of which was at 4:30pm on a Friday). I apologize for the length of this post (I am a professor, after all), but I've broken things up into sections so you can skip around as desired.  Executive Summary: Academic research is essential for the advancement of technology and scientific/medical breakthroughs and is how we train the next generation of res...

Embed code for the Image Grid. Home page of  tmvis.cs.odu.edu This work has been supported by a  NEH/IMLS Digital Humanities Advancement Grant ( HAA-256368-17 ).  The web is dynamic, meaning webpages that exist today may not exist tomorrow. Even if a webpage continues to exist, it could display completely different content than it used to. Web archives, such as the  Internet Archive  (IA),  Archive-It  (AIT), and  many others , preserve past versions of webpages for use by scholars, researchers, and the general public. Using Memento terminology, an archived version of a webpage at a particular time is called a memento, or URI-M, and the list of all mementos for a particular webpage is called a TimeMap. Different web pages have different sized TimeMaps. For example, the TimeMap for odu.edu contains over 2000 mementos, while the TimeMap for cnn.com contains around 300,000. Analyzing such large TimeMaps is nearly impossible to do manually. Bas...

Michael and I attended the NEH Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) Project Directors' Meeting and the "ODH at Ten" celebration  ( #ODHatTen ) on February 9 in DC.  We were invited because of our recent NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant,  "Visualizing Webpage Changes Over Time"  (described briefly in a previous blog post when the award was first announced), which is joint work with Pamela Graham and Alex Thurman  from  Columbia University Libraries and Deborah Kempe from the Frick Art Reference Library and NYARC . The presentations were recorded, so I expect to see a set of videos available in the future, as was done for the 2014 meeting  ( my 2014 trip report ).    Update: 2018 Lightning Round Talk Videos The afternoon keynote was given by  Kate Zwaard , Chief of National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress. She highlighted the great work being done at  LC Labs . Kate Zwaard is today's #ODHatTEN ke...

In August, we were excited to be awarded an 18-month Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) .  Our project, "Visualizing Webpage Changes Over Time", was one of 31 awards made through this joint NEH/IMLS program ( award announcement ). Michele C. Weigle and Michael L. Nelson - ODU Deborah Kempe - Frick Art Reference Library and New York Art Resources Consortium Pamela Graham and Alex Thurman - Columbia University Libraries Oct 2017 – Mar 2019, $75,000 As web archives grow in importance and size, techniques for understanding how a web page changes through time need to adapt from an assumption of scarcity (just a few copies of a page, no more than a few weeks or months apart) to one of abundance (tens of thousands of copies of a page, spanning as much as 20 years). This project, a joint effort among ODU, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), and...

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...

We are grateful for the continued support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and their Office of Digital Humanities for our "Archive What I See Now" project. In 2013, we received support for 1 year through a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant .  This week, along with our collaborator Dr. Liza Potts from Michigan State, we were awarded a 3-year Digital Humanities Implementation Grant . We are excited to be one of the seven projects selected this year . Our project goals are two-fold: to enable users to generate files suitable for use by large-scale archives (i.e., WARC files) with tools as simple as the "bookmarking" or "save page as" approaches that they already know to enable users to access the archived resources in their browser through one of the available add-ons or through a local version of the Wayback Machine ( wayback ). Our innovation is in allowing individuals to "archive what I see now". The user can create a st...

Earlier this year, we were awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for our project "Archive What I See Now": Bringing Institutional Web Archiving Tools to the Individual Researcher. We were invited to attend the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors' Meeting in early October, but due to the government shutdown, the meeting was cancelled.  Here I'll give the quick overview of the project that I'd planned for that meeting.  (Mat Kelly has already posted a nice description of the tools we've been developing, WARCreate and WAIL, at http://bit.ly/wc-wail .) The slides I'd prepared are below: "Archive What I See Now" - NEH ODH overview from Michele Weigle Our project is focused on helping people archive web pages. Since much of our cultural heritage is now published on the web, we want to make sure that important pages are archived for the future. Since 1996, the Internet Archive and other archiving services ha...