Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS) of the Old Dominion University organized a Hackathon from October 24 to November 1, 2024. The competition featured three teams from the master's category and three from the PhD category, each presenting innovative projects. Participants chose from five research topics provided by the organizing committee. Two teams from the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group participated in the hackathon: Binary Bandits ( David Calano and Dominik Soos ) and our team, Titans ( Himarsha Jayanetti , Kritika Garg , and Kumushini Thennakoon ).  We won the PhD category with our project, "Tracking Political Trends Around the US Presidential Election.” This was a mini project completed within a limited time frame, making it a fast-paced challenge. Despite the constraints, our team tackled various obstacles in collecting and analyzing data. In this blog post, we provide an overview of our project and highlight its key contribution...

Inspired by AlNoamany's work from " Detecting off-topic pages within TimeMaps in Web archives " I am pleased to announce an alpha release of the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit (OTMT). The results of testing with this software will be presented at iPres 2018 and those results are now available as a preprint . Web archive collections are created with a specific purpose in mind. A curator will supply seeds for the collection and create multiple versions of these seeds in order to study the evolution of a web page over time. This is valuable for following the changes in an organization or the events in a news story. Unfortunately, depending on the curator's intent, sometimes these seeds go off-topic. Because web archive crawling software has no way to know that a page is off-topic, these mementos are added to the collection. Below I list a few examples of off-topic pages within Archive-It collections. This memento from the Human Rights collection at Archive-It create...