Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Archives Unleashed Datathon is a two-day event hosted by the Archive Unleashed team where participants from different research backgrounds collaborate together to explore web archive collections. The fourth Archives Unleashed datathon partnered with Columbia University Libraries  was supposed to happen in New York City. However, as the spread of COVID-19 cases began to increase, the organizers had to make the tough decision of canceling the New York datathon. Due to the rapidly-evolving COVID-19 situation, we have canceled the datathon which was to be held at Columbia University, March 26-27, 2020. This decision was not taken lightly and was made with the best interests of our attendees. We have been in touch with all attendees. — The Archives Unleashed Project (@unleasharchives) March 3, 2020 In the same email that brought the news of event cancellation, Ian Milligan also mentioned the possibility of organizing the event online through Zoom and Slac

They : Hey Sawood , nice to see you again. Me : Hi, I am glad to see you too. They : Did you attend all hackathons, I mean datathons? Me : Yes, I attended all of the four Archives Unleashed events so far. They : How did you like it? Me : Well, there is a reason why I attended all of them, despite being a seemingly busy PhD researcher. They : So, what is your research about? Me : I am trying to profile various web archives to build a high-level understanding of their holdings, primarily, for the sake of efficiently routing Memento aggregation requests, but there can be many more use cases of such profiles... [and the conversation continues...] On day zero of Archives Unleashed 4.0 in London, conversations among many familiar and unfamiliar faces started with travel and lodging related questions, but soon emerged into mass storage challenges, scaling issues, quality and coverage of web archives, long-term maintenance of archival tools, documentation and d

Archive Unleashed 3.0 took place in the Internet Archive , San Francisco, CA. The workshop was two days long, February 23-24, 2017. This workshop took place in conjunction with a National Web Symposium , hosted at the Internet Archive, February 23 – 24. Four members of Web Science and Digital Library group ( WSDL ) from Old Dominion University had the opportunity to attend. The members are: Sawood Alam , Mohamed Aturban , Erika Siregar , and myself . This event was the third follow-up of the Archives Unleashed Web Archive Hackathon 1.0 , and Web Archive Hackathon 2.0 . @WebSciDL at @internetarchive after Archives Unleashed 3.0 wrap up. We have a winner of #HackArchives pic.twitter.com/vYLi89yap0 — Sawood Alam (@ibnesayeed) February 25, 2017 This workshop, was supported by the Internet Archive ,  Rutgers University , and the University of Waterloo . The workshop brought together a small group of around 20 researchers that worked together to develop new open source tools t

"Team Turtle" in Archive Unleashed in Washington DC (from left to right: N. Chah, S. Marti, M. Aturban , and I. Amin) The first presidential debate (H. Clinton v. D. Trump) took place on last Monday, September 26, 2016 at Hofstra University , New York. The questions were about topics like economy, taxes, jobs, and race. During the debate, the candidates mentioned those topics (and other issues) and, in many cases, they associated a topic with a particular place or a US state (e.g., shootings in Chicago, Illinois, and crime rate in New York). This reminded me about the work that we had done in the second Archives Unleashed Hackathon , held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I worked with the "Team Turtle" ( Niel Chah , Steve Marti , Mohamed Aturban , and Imaduddin Amin ) on analyzing an archived collection, provided by the Library of Congress, about the 2004 Presidential Election (G. Bush v. J. Kerry). The collection contained hundreds of archived w

Trip Report for the IIPC Building Better Crawlers Hackathon in London, UK.                            On September 22-23, 2016, I attended the IIPC Building Better Crawlers Hackathon ( #iipchack ) at the British Library in London, UK. Having been to London almost exactly 2 years ago for the Digital Libraries 2014 conference , I was excited to go back, but was more so anticipating collaborating with some folks I had long been in contact with during my tenure as a PhD student researcher at ODU. The event was a well-organized yet loosely scheduled meeting that resembled more of an "Unconference" than a Hackathon in that the discussion topics were defined as the event progressed rather than a larger portion being devoted to implementation (see the recent Archives Unleashed 1.0 and 2.0 trip reports ). The represented organizations were: British Library Bilbiotheque nationale de France (BnF) Internet Archive National Library of Denmark State and University Library of