Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The video "The NZ Mosque Attack Doesn't Add Up" was recommended from 51 channels In this post, I examine the results of YouTube's recommendation algorithm through an example of series of videos recommended by YouTube. From this example, I found that: The recommended videos are generated to maximize watch time There is significant correlation between videos' metadata and their recommendation order YouTube's recommended videos promote conspiracy theories (in this example) Maximizing watch time is YouTube's ultimate goal YouTube's recommendation algorithm, among other discovery features, focuses on watch time to keep viewers glued to the site. In theory, maximizing engagement benefits YouTube, content creators, and advertisers. It encourages YouTubers to create content that people actually want to watch because it makes them more money from displaying more ads. On the other hand, YouTube makes money from advertisers because they find thei

ISIS members immolating captured Jordanian pilot Web archives have been used for purposes other than digital preservation and browsing historical data. These purposes can be divided into three categories: Uploading content to web archives to ensure continuous availability of the data. Avoiding governments' censorship or websites' terms of service. Using URLs from web archives, instead of direct links, for news sites with opposing ideologies to avoid increasing their web traffic and deprive them of ad revenue. 1. Uploading content to web archives to ensure continuous availability of the data Web archives, by design, are intended to solve the problem of digital data preservation so people can access data when it is no longer available on the live web. In this paper,  Who and What Links to the Internet Archive , ( Yasmin AlNoamany , Ahmed AlSum , Michele C. Weigle , and Michael L. Nelson , 2013), the authors show that the percentage of the requested archived pag

The NDSA/NDIIPP ( @ndiipp ) Partner Meetup took place July 19-21 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Technical and non-technical joined together to form an aggregated consortium of archivists, librarians, digital media specialists and concerned parties. Three representatives from the ODU Web Sciences and Digital Libraries group attended to make archivists aware of tools they had developed to accomplish the common goal of web archiving. WS-DL’s Comtributions to the NDSA/NDIPP Meetup Mat Kelly presented the Mozilla Firefox add-on Archive Facebook to a breakout group of presentations specifically targeting web archiving. The redesigned and re-architected add-on allows a user to archive the content of his/her Facebook account with the result being truly WYSIWYG versus Facebook’s native offerings of a content dump.   NDIIPP/NDSA 2011 - Archive Facebook from Mat Kelly Vivens Ndatinya showed the workings of a tool he is currently buildin