Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In collaboration with Dr. Alexander Nwala at William & Mary and Dr. Sawood Alam at the Internet Archive , we ( Himarsha R. Jayanetti , Dr. Michael L. Nelson , and Dr. Michele C. Weigle ) at the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group at Old Dominion University received an award of $750,000 in federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) beginning in August 2026. The award supports the project, “CiteCast: Linking US local & national television news to cited web resources” .  The project focuses on identifying and preserving web resources referenced in archived U.S. local and national television news. Television news frequently points viewers to websites, social media posts, and other online resources, but those resources can change or disappear over time. The goal of this is to help connect these references in television archives with the corresponding web resources and preserve them for future research. Figure 1: Example TV ...

This year the ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2026) was held from March 27–28 as an in-person event. The conference took place in Alexandria, Virginia, and the event was hosted by the Virginia Tech's Institute for Advanced Computing (IAC) . CAPWIC is all about bringing together women in computing and their peers to support each other and grow in the field. The conference connects students, faculty, and industry professionals from across the Capital Region – Pennsylvania to Virginia to share ideas, discuss research, and build a strong, supportive community. The conference featured workshops, technical talks, flash talks, research shorts, poster presentations, as well as panel,  birds-of-a-feather and keynote sessions. I was the only participant from Old Dominion University's Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group this year, where I presented a research short. The event included parallel sessions across various categories and topi...