Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The development, state, and future of 🐳 Web Archiving Integration Layer. 💄∨🐷?                                                                  Some time ago I created and deployed Web Archiving Integration Layer (frequently abbreviated as WAIL ), an application that provides users pre-configured local instances of Heritrix and OpenWayback. This tool was originally created for the Personal Digital Archiving 2013 conference and has gone through a metamorphosis. The original impetus for creating the application was that the browser-based WARCreate extension required some sort of server-like software to save files locally because of the limitations of the Google Chrome API and JavaScript at the time (2012). WARCreate would perform an HTTP POST to this local server instance, which could would then return an HTTP response with an appropriate MIME type that would cause the browser to download the file. I initially used XAMPP for this with a PHP script within the Apache instance. Th

Mat Kelly attended and presented at the JCDL 2015 Doctoral Consortium. This is his report.                            Evaluating progress between milestones in a PhD program is difficult due to the inherent open-endedness of research. A means of evaluating whether a student's topic is sound and has merit while still early on in his career is to attend a doctoral consortium. Such an event, as the one held at the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) , has previously provided a platform for WS-DL students (see 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , and others ) to network with faculty and researchers from other institutions as well as observe the approach that other PhD students at the same point in their career use to explain their respective topics. As the wheels have turned, I have showed enough progress in my research for it to be suitable for preliminary presentation at the 2015 JCDL Doctoral Consortium -- so did so this past Sunday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Along with seven

Mat Kelly and Michele Weigle travel to and present at the Web Archiving Collaboration Conference in NYC.                            On June 4 and 5, 2015, Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ) and I ( @machawk1 ) traveled to New York City to attend the Web Archiving Collaboration conference held at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs . The conference gave us an opportunity to present our work from the incentive award provided to us by Columbia University Libraries and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2014. Robert Wolven of Columbia University Libraries started off the conference with welcoming the audience and emphasizing the variety of presentations that were to occur on that day. He then introduced Jim Neal, the keynote speaker. Jim Neal starting by noting the challenges of "repository chaos", namely, which version of a document should be cited for online resources if multiple versions exist. "Born-digital content must deal with integrity&quo

Mat Kelly taught CS418 - Web Programming at Old Dominion University in Spring 2015. This blog post highlights some teaching methods and technologies used (namely, Docker and GitHub) and how he integrated their usage into the flow of the course.                            For Spring Semester at Old Dominion University I taught CS418 - Web Programming with some updated methods and content. This course has been previously taught by various members of ODU WS-DL ( 2014 , 2013 , 2012 ). The first deviation from previous offerings of the course was to change the subject of the project. Previously, CS418 students were asked to progressively build an online forum like phpBB . Web sites resembling this medium are no longer as common as they once were on the Web, so a refresh was needed to keep the project familiar and relevant. For Spring, I asked students to build a Question-and-Answer website akin to StackOverflow.com . Being students of computer science, all were familiar with the c

Mat Kelly and various other graduate students in the state of Virginia present their graduate research at the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.                            On Friday, April 17, 2015 I attended the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) Student Research Conference at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia. This conference is slightly beyond the scope of what we at ODU WS-DL ( @webscidl ) usually investigate, as the research requirement was that it was relevant to NASA's objectives as a space agency. My previous work with LaRC's satellite imagery allowed me to approach the imagery files with the perspective a computational scientist. More on my presentation, "Facilitation of the A Posteriori Replication of Web Published Satellite Imagery" below . The conference started off with registration and a provided continental breakfast. Mary Sandy, the VSGC Director and Chris Carter, the VSGC Deputy Director began by describing