Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

 "Where were you when the planes hit the World Trade Center?" It seems like everyone has an answer to that question.  On 9/11 , my mom was visiting my grandparents in a small town in Wisconsin. My dad was stationed in Korea and called my mom to turn on the news. She was standing in my grandparents' living room, on the phone with my dad, when she watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.  I was 2 years old, so what I know about 9/11 is from documentaries and stories from my parents and grandparents. The same is true for those in my generation and generations to follow.  With the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 Attack, I was curious how 9/11 was reflected in the Internet Archive. I looked at the captures for 5 major new networks on September 11, 2001: CNN ,  Fox News ,  MSNBC ,  Washington Post , and  NY Times . The first plane hit at 8:46 am and the earliest capture from those websites came from CNN at 8:03 pm, almost 12 hours later. These ...

Cover Pages of Wijeya newspapers When we ( Gavindya  and  Yasith ) were young adults, we read the  Wijeya newspaper weekly back in Sri Lanka.  Wijeya is a native language (Sinhala), weekly newspaper in Sri Lanka, published by  Wijeya Newspapers Ltd . Back in the days, the  Wijeya newspaper  was published only on paper. However, today most newspapers are also published on websites as online newspapers as well. We remember reading the Wijeya newspaper weekly, whenever we got free time. Since our parents did not allow us to use computers much, we dedicated our leisure time mostly for reading.  The Wijeya newspaper included sections for science, fiction, drawings and creative writings of children, news about schools, and general news (local and international). Sometimes, the Wijeya newspaper was sold out, and our parents had to go to a different store to buy it for us. It was a very popular newspaper among young adults. We loved to read it mostl...

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the  Internet Archive , I decided to use the Wayback Machine to dig through my past related to Elizabethtown College , PA, mainly when I was featured as an International Leadership Assistant (ILA) on their international student website . I graduated from Elizabethtown College (Etown) in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering. In 2016, I had the opportunity to join the International Leadership Team to help international students promote global culture through various activities. I organized Culture Through ART  every Fall semester and assisted my colleague  Alexandria Takahashi  in developing  US Culture & Slang teaching materials. It shows a great example that international students were not only expressing their culture through crafts (e.g., origami) and paintings, but they were also learning to adopt US culture (Figure 1). At present, as a Ph.D. student researching in the area of Digital Libraries,...

Since 2013, I have been a principal contributor to the Memento MediaWiki Extension . We recently released version 2.2.0 to support MediaWiki versions of 1.31.1 and greater. During the extension's development, I have detailed some of its concepts on this blog , I have presented it at WikiConference USA 2014 , and I have even helped the W3C adopt it . It became the cornerstone of my Master's Thesis , where I showed how the Memento MediaWiki Extension could help people avoid spoilers on fan wikis . Why do Memento and MediaWiki belong together? The "dimensions of genericity" table from " Web Architecture: Generic Resources " by Tim Berners-Lee in 1996, annotated to display the RFCs that implemented these dimensions for the Web. Memento is not limited to web archives. When Tim Berners-Lee was developing the Web, he identified four dimensions of genericity : time, language, content-type, and target medium . HTTP enthusiasts will recognize that three of thes...

This story started in December, 2017 with  Joy-Ann Reid (of MSNBC ) apologizing for "insensitive LGBT blog posts" that she wrote on her blog many years ago when she was a morning radio talk show host in Florida.   This apology was, at least in some quarters, (begrudgingly) accepted .   Today's update was news that Reid and her lawyers had in December claimed that either her blog, and/or the Internet Archive's record of the blog had been hacked ( Mediaite , The Intercept ).  Later today, the Internet Archive issued a blog post to deny the claim that it was hacked , stating: This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (Reid’s claim regarding the point of manipu...