Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Source: Techworm GitHub is used by more than 40 million developers and currently hosts more than 100 million repositories. In early November 2019, GitHub shared plans to open the Arctic Code Vault, an effort to store and preserve open source software like Flutter and TensorFlow . With this endeavor, code for all open source projects will be stored on specialized ultra-durable 3,500-foot film with frames that include 8.8 million pixels each, designed to last 1,000 years. The data can be read by a computer or a human with a magnifying glass in case of a global power outage. "Our primary mission is to preserve open source software for future generations. We also intend the GitHub Archive Program to serve as a testament to the importance of the open source community. It’s our hope that it will, both now and in the future, further publicize the worldwide open source movement; contribute to greater adoption of open source and open data policies worldwide; and encourage long-ter

"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

Members from WSDL who participated in the Hackathon 2.0 Last week, June 13-15, 2016, six members of Web Science and Digital Library group ( WSDL ) from Old Dominion University had the opportunity to attend the second Archives Unleashed 2.0 at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. This event is a follow-up to the Archives Unleashed ( Web Archive Hackathon 1.0 ) held in March 2015 at the University of Toronto Library, Toronto, Ontario Canada. We ( Mat Kelly , Alexander Nwala , John Berlin , Sawood Alam , Shawn Jones , and Mohamed Aturban ) met with other participants, from various countries, who have different backgrounds -- librarians, historians, computer scientists, etc. The main goal of this event is to build tools for web archives as well as to support this kind of ongoing community to have a common vision of how to access and extract data from web collections. This event was made possible with generous support from the National Science Foundation , the Social Science

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library  (University of Toronto) Between March 3 - March 5, 2016, Librarians, Archivists, Historians, Computer Scientists, etc., came together for the Archives Unleashed Web Archive Hackathon at the University of Toronto Robarts Library, Toronto, Ontario Canada. This event gave researchers the opportunity to collaboratively develop open-source tools for web archives. The event was organized by Ian Milligan , (assistant professor of Canadian and digital history in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo), Nathalie Casemajor (assistant professor in communication studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Québec in Outaouais (Canada)), Jimmy Lin (the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo), Matthew Weber (Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University), and Nicholas Worby (the Government Information &