Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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 Using Memento terminology, an archived version of a webpage at a particular time is called a memento, or URI-M, and the list of all mementos for a particular webpage is called a TimeMap.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...

Paywall page from The Advertister Paywalls  have become increasingly notable in the Internet Archive over the past few years. In our recent investigation into news similarity for U.S. news outlets, we chose from a list of websites and then pulled the top stories. We did not initially include subscriber based sites, such as The Financial Times  or Wall Street Journal , because these sites only provided snippets of an article, and then users would be confronted with a "Subscribe Now" sign to view the remaining content. The New York Times , as well as other news sites, also have subscriber based content but access is only limited once a user has exceeded a set number of stories seen. In our study of 30 days of news sites, we found 24 URIs that were deemed to be paywalls, and these are listed below: Memento Responses All of these URIs point to the Internet Archive but result in an HTTP status code of 404. We took all of these URI-Ms from the homepage of thei...

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...

Mat Kelly and Michele Weigle travel to and present at the Web Archiving Collaboration Conference in NYC.                            On June 4 and 5, 2015, Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ) and I ( @machawk1 ) traveled to New York City to attend the Web Archiving Collaboration conference held at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs . The conference gave us an opportunity to present our work from the incentive award provided to us by Columbia University Libraries and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2014. Robert Wolven of Columbia University Libraries started off the conference with welcoming the audience and emphasizing the variety of presentations that were to occur on that day. He then introduced Jim Neal, the keynote speaker. Jim Neal starting by noting the challenges of "repository chaos", namely, which version of a docum...

Mat Kelly and Dr. Michael L. Nelson travel to Washington, DC and both report on their current research as well as be made aware of others' work in the field.                            On July 22 and 23, 2014, Dr. Michael Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ) and I ( @machawk1 ) attended Digital Preservation 2014 in Washington, DC. This was my fourth consecutive NDIIPP ( @ndiipp ) / NDSA ( @ndsa2 ) meeting (see trip reports from Digital Preservation 2011 , 2012 , 2013 ). With the largest attendance yet (300+) and compressed into two days, the schedule was jam-packed with interesting talks. Per usual, videos for most of the presentations are included inline below. Day One Micah Altman ( @drmaltman ) led the presentations with information about the NDSA and asked, regarding Amazon claiming reliability of 99.99999999999% for uptime, "What do the eleve...