Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is almost 20 years old. As the Wayback Machine nears its second decade full of operation, I reflected on how my research has been inspired by the work that goes into enabling the historical replay of the web.   The @waybackmachine is officially old enough to vote but not drink this year. 468 Billion web pages and more than 1,000,000,000,000 captures later, the Wayback Machine is still public, free, and committed to access for all. https://t.co/EdYMeVz2q5 — Internet Archive (@internetarchive) October 26, 2020 I’ve been away from the WS-DL blog for a little while, so a reintroduction is probably worthwhile. I am a PhD alumnus from the WS-DL group and am currently a Principal Researcher at The MITRE Corporation . As you may guess, my work in the WS-DL group focused on web archiving and specifically the crawler and information collection trade-offs of using crawlers that exercise JavaScript on web pages (e.g., Brozzler ) vs those that...

While researching my dissertation topic  (slides 2--28) on social media profile discovery, I encountered a related paper titled Gathering Alumni Information from a Web Social Network  written by Gabriel Resende Gonçalves , Anderson Almeida Ferreira , and Guilherme Tavares de Assis , which was published in the proceedings of the  9th IEEE Latin American Web Congress (LA-WEB) . In this paper, the authors detailed their approach to define a semi-automated method to gather information regarding alumni of a given undergraduate program at Brazilian higher education institutions. Specifically, they use the  Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) to identify candidate LinkedIn pages based on a comparative evaluation of similar pages in their training set. The authors contend alumni are efficiently found through their process, which is facilitated by focused crawling of data publicly available on social networks posted by the alumni themselves. The proposed methodology...

The primary goal of any alumni association is to maintain and strengthen the ties between its alumni, the community, and the mission of the university. With social media, it's easier than ever to connect with current and former graduates on Facebook , Instagram or Twitter with a simple invitation to "like us" or "follow me." Considering just one of these social platforms, we recently analyzed the Twitter networks of twenty-three (23) Virginia colleges and universities to determine what, if any, social characteristics were shared among the institutions and whether we could gain any insight by examining the public profiles of their respective followers. The colleges of interest, ranked by number of followers in Table 1, vary in size, mission, type of institution, admissions selectivity and perceived prestige. Each of the alumni associations has maintained a Twitter presence for an average of six (6) years. The oldest Twitter account belongs to Roanoke C...