Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: EnSU Architecture. This is Figure 2 in our paper. This blog post summarizes our paper, " Context-Based URL Classification for Open Access Datasets and Software in Scholarly Documents ," ( preprint ) published in the 2025 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL ’25) .  Many scholarly papers include URLs that point to open-access datasets and software ( OADS ), but the URL string alone rarely tells us what the link refers to. In this paper, we present EnSU , an ensemble of three complementary models for classifying these URLs using the surrounding citation context. EnSU assigns each URL to one of six categories that jointly reflect both the resource type (dataset vs. software) and resource provider (authors vs. third parties), plus two catch-all categories for projects and general links. On our  OADS-1K dataset, EnSU achieves a macro-average F1-score of up to 0.90 on a stratified 80/20 split and a mean macro-average F1-score of 0.89 across five-fold c...

Figure 1: Example of an image pair from Reyes Ayala’s dataset of a live web page (left screenshot) and an archived web page (right screenshot) . For the Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project , we have created web archiving livestreams ( example livestream ) that use tools to measure the performance of a web archive crawler during the livestream. In a previous blog post , I compared six different approaches for measuring web archiving and replay performance metrics so that I could identify tools that could be used during our future web archiving livestreams. In this post, I will summarize another related work (“ Towards a better QA process: Automatic detection of quality problems in archived websites using visual comparisons ”) by Brenda Reyes Ayala that determines the quality of an archived web page by comparing screenshots of the live web page and archived web page.   Reyes Ayala, B. (2025). Towards a better QA process: Automatic detection of quality problems in archived we...

Figure 1: (a) Difficulties in understanding posts due to missing or assumed context, (b) need for standardization of posts (Figure 1  in  M.J. Ferdous et al.). Introduction Social media sites such as Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube play a central role in how people exchange ideas, debate current issues, and build communities, with threaded discussions serving as a key mechanism for interaction across these platforms. These platforms are designed around visual structures: nested replies, indentation, spacing, and visual grouping allow sighted users to quickly scan conversations, identify relationships between posts, and decide where to engage. For blind users who rely on screen readers, accessing these conversations involves a fundamentally different interaction model. As shown in the accompanying video, screen readers present content linearly, reading one element at a time while the user moves through posts and interface elements using keyboard commands such as Tab and Shift+Tab...

  The  ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)  is the premier venue for research at the intersection of computing and accessibility. It brings together a diverse community of scholars, practitioners, and designers who are dedicated to advancing technologies that empower people with disabilities. This year, the  26th ASSETS Conference (ASSETS 2024)  was held in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, from October 27 to 30, 2024. In this blog post, I highlight our paper, “ Understanding Low Vision Graphical Perception of Bar Charts ”, which examines how individuals with low vision interpret bar charts using screen magnifiers. Our study found that low-vision users face frequent challenges when reading charts, including visual blur, difficulty tracking between elements, and confusion caused by distractor bars. Perception errors were higher when bars were unaligned, stacked, or closely spaced. In some cases, design choices that typica...