Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Mixed language blocks on a memento of a Twitter timeline. Highlighted with blue colored box for Portuguese, orange for English, and red for Urdu. Dotted border indicates the template present in the original HTML response while blocks with solid borders indicate lazily loaded content. Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that Twitter is a multi-lingual website, supporting 47 different international languages ? How about if I were to tell you that a usual Twitter timeline page can contain tweets in whatever languages the owner of the handle chooses to tweet, but can also show navigation bar and various sidebar blocks in many different languages simultaneously, now surprised? Well, while it makes no sense, it may actually happen in web archives when a memento of a timeline is accessed as shown in Figure 1. Spoiler alert! Cookies are to be blamed, once again . Last month, I was investigating a real life version of " Ron Burgundy will read anything on the...

On December 12, 2008, an Urdu blogger  Muhammad Waris reported an issue in Urdu Mehfil about his lost blog that was hosted on UrduTech.net . Not just Waris, but many other Urdu bloggers of that time were anxious about their lost blogs due to a sudden outage of the blogging service UrduTech. The downtime lasted for several weeks which has changed the shape of the Urdu blogosphere. Before diving into the UrduTech story, let's have a brief look into the Urdu language and the role of the Urdu Mehfil forum in promoting Urdu on the Web. Urdu is a language spoken by more than 100 million people worldwide (about 1.5% of the global population), primarily in India and Pakistan. It has a rich literature, while being one of the premier languages of poetry in South Asia for centuries. However, the digital footprint of Urdu has been relatively smaller than some other languages like Arabic or Hindi. In the early days of the Web, computers were not easily available to the masses of the ...

The Internet Archive (IA) and Open Library offer over 6 million fully accessible public domain eBooks. I searched for the term "dictionary" while I was casually browsing the scanned book collection to see how many dictionaries they have. I found several dictionaries in various languages. I randomly picked  A Dictionary of the English Language (1828) - Samuel Johnson, John Walker, Robert S. Jameson from the search result. I opened the dictionary in fullscreen mode  using IA's opensource online BookReader application . This book reader application has common tools for browsing an image based book such as flipping pages, seeking a page, zooming, and changing the layout. In the toolbar it has some interesting features like reading aloud and full-text searching. I wondered how could it possibly perform text searching and read aloud an scanned raster image based book? I sneaked inside the page source code which pointed me to some documentation pages. I realized it is using ...