Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

A story on Storify titled: "Lecture on Academic Freedom"  (capture date: 2016-05-31) The story on Storify titled: "Lecture on Academic Freedom" could not be found on Google   (capture date: 2016-05-31) The story on Storify titled: "Lecture on Academic Freedom" could not be found on Storify native search  (capture date: 2016-05-31) A part of our research ( funded by IMLS ) to build collections for stories or events involves exploring content curation sites like Storify  in order to determine if they hold quality (news worthy, timely, etc.) content. Storify is a social network service used to create stories which consists of text and multimedia content, as well as content from other social media sites like Twitter , Facebook and Instagram . Our exploration involved collecting stories from Storify over a period in other to manually inspect the stories to determine their newsworthiness. This exploration was dual natured: we collected latest

Recently I was emailing a friend and wanted to update her about the recent buzz we have enjoyed with Hany SalahEldeen 's TPDL 2012 paper about the loss rate of resources shared over Twitter.  I remembered that an article in the MIT Technology Review from the Physics arXiv blog started the whole wave of popular press (e.g., MIT Technology Review , BBC , The Atlantic , Spiegel ).  To help convey the amount of social media sharing of these stories, I was sending links to the sites using social media search engine Topsy .  Having recently discovered it, Topsy has quickly become one of my favorite sites.  It does many things, but the part I enjoy most is the ability to prepend " http://topsy.com/ " to a URI to discover how many times a URI has been shared and who is sharing it.  For example: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120927-the-decaying-web becomes: http://topsy.com/http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120927-the-decaying-web and you can see all the tweets th

I am pleased to report on the successful completion of my Master's Degree thesis entitled "An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Archives of Web Resources Requiring Authentication". The problem that I hoped to resolve with the study was one that plagues software like Archive Facebook , even to this day, in that when the hierarchy a social media website changes, tools created to preserve content on those sites tend to break. By conforming these tools to a specification that is setup to represent the hierarchy of the target social media websites, these tools become adaptive without the need of continuous maintenance on the part of the developer. Also in the study was an exploration and enumeration of various aspects of personal web archiving that prevent the field from taking advantage of the tools, procedures and mediums that are widely used in conventional web archiving. In addition to simply identifying the problem, I also created a Google Chrome extension, W

The ODU WS-DL research group kicked off  JCDL 2012  at  The George Washington University  by presenting the first two  Doctoral Consortium  papers on June 10th, 2012. The Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for PhD students that are in the early stages of defining their research. It is a venue for presenting a potential path through the PhD, as well as a way to receive feedback from peers and other researchers. Past WS-DL students have benefited from the workshop, including Joan Smith , Frank McCown , Martin Klein , Chuck Cartledge , and Ahmed Alsum . Hany SalahEldeen and I ( Justin F. Brunelle ) were honored and excited to be the next class of WS-DL students to participate. The first session was the Data Preservation and Curation section, chaired by Maristella Agosti . I presented the first paper entitled " Filling in the Blanks: Capturing Dynamically Generated Content ". My work will study capturing, sharing, and archiving Web 2.0 resources that traditional crawlers canno

Glue Conference 2012  took place at the Omni Interlocken Hotel Bloomfield, CO on May 23 and 24th. Gluecon is an information packed developer conference that focuses on cloud, mobile, APIs, big data, and most importantly, developers. Some of the topics included NoSQL, node.js, HTML5, backend-as-a-service, cloud management and security, cloud storage, Hadoop, DevOps, mobile app development, and cloud platforms. I attended the conference with sponsorship (full ride) from  FullContact .  These guys were unbelievably gracious and showed me a great time while I was out there.  I came in contact with them when  Bart Lorang , CEO of FullContact contacted me over e-mail and wanted to setup a time to talk with him and his engineering team about a  paper  I had  published  at a  KDD'11 workshop .  After meeting with the guys and talking shop, I found out that they are solving the same real world problems (at world scale) that I was working on in my graduate research (at individual scale

The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media . Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution . Several books were even published documenting the 18 days . All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0 . As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10% of this digital content is already gone. Websites like Twitter , YouTube , Facebook , Storify , 1000Memories , Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or vid

Author:  Carlton Northern The SIGKDD 2011 conference took place August 21 - 24 at the Hyatt Manchester in San Diego, CA.  Researchers from all over the world interested in knowledge discovery and data mining were in attendance.  This conference in particular has a heavy statistical analysis flavor and many presentations were math intensive. I was invited to present my masters project research at the Mining Data Semantics (MDS2011) Workshop of KDD.  In this paper, we present an approach to find social media profiles of people from an organization.  This is possible due to the links created between members an organization. For instance, co-workers or students will likely friend each other creating hyperlinks between their respective accounts.  These links, if public, can be mined and used to disambiguate other profiles that may share the same names as those individuals we are searching for.  The following figure shows the amount of profiles found from the ODU Computer Science st