Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Two WS-DL classes are offered for Spring 2016: CS 725/825 - Information Visualization , Dr. Weigle CS 432/532 - Introduction to Web Science , Dr. Nelson Information Visualization is being offered both online (CRNs 29183 (HR), 29184 (VA), 29185 (US)) and on-campus (CRN 25511).  Web Science is being offered for the first time with the 432/532 numbers (CRNs 27556 and 27557, respectively), but the class will be similar to the Fall 2014 offering as 495/595 .  --Michael

The primary goal of any alumni association is to maintain and strengthen the ties between its alumni, the community, and the mission of the university. With social media, it's easier than ever to connect with current and former graduates on Facebook , Instagram or Twitter with a simple invitation to "like us" or "follow me." Considering just one of these social platforms, we recently analyzed the Twitter networks of twenty-three (23) Virginia colleges and universities to determine what, if any, social characteristics were shared among the institutions and whether we could gain any insight by examining the public profiles of their respective followers. The colleges of interest, ranked by number of followers in Table 1, vary in size, mission, type of institution, admissions selectivity and perceived prestige. Each of the alumni associations has maintained a Twitter presence for an average of six (6) years. The oldest Twitter account belongs to Roanoke C...

From November 2nd through November 5th, Dr. Nelson , Dr. Weigle , and I attended the iPRES2015 conference at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill . This served as a return visit for Drs. Nelson and Weigle; Dr. Nelson worked at UNC through a NASA fellowship and Dr. Weigle received her PhD from UNC. We also met with Martin Klein , a WS-DL alumnus now at the UCLA Library. While the last ODU contingent to visit UNC was not so lucky, we returned to Norfolk relatively unscathed. Cal Lee and Helen Tibbo opened the conference with a welcome on November 3rd, followed by Nancy McGovern 's keynote address delivered with Leo Konstantelos and Maureen Pennock . This was not a traditional keynote, but instead an interactive dialogue in which several challenge areas were presented to the audience, and the audience responded -- live and on twitter -- significant achievements or advances in those challenge areas from #lastyear. For example, Dr. Nelson identified the #iCanHazMemento...

Excited to go to @ghc #GHC15 and meet 12,000 women in tech :) @ArabWIC @oducs @WebSciDL — Yasmina Anwar (@yasmina_anwar) October 13, 2015 On October 13-17, the atmosphere at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas was electric with 12,000 women in tech from all around the world attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), the world's largest gathering for women in computing. GHC is presented by the Anita Borg Institute  (ABI) for Women and Technology, which was founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney in 1994 to bring together research and career interests of women in computing and encourage the participation of women in computing. The incredible progress of GHC went from 500 women in technology at 1994 to 12,000 women this year. I was humbled to receive a scholarship from the ABI to attend GHC 2015. I also was thrilled twice before to attend the GHC 2013 in Minnesota and GHC 2014 in Phoenix. This year, I represe...

Figure 1. An Annotation is defined by OAC  as a set of connected resources   In our  TPDL paper , we studied 6281 highlighted text annotations (out of 7744 annotations) available in the Hypothes.is annotation system in January 2015. The main goal was to investigate the prevalence of orphaned annotations, where neither a live Web page nor an archived copy of the web page contains the text that had previously been annotated. Recently, we applied the same analysis as in our TPDL paper to a larger number of annotations.  Figure 2 illustrates that the number of annotations in Hypothes.is has been increasing since July 2013. Our TPDL paper focused on the 7744 annotations available in January 2015.  Our updated paper (available at arXiv.org ) analyzed the 20,133 highlighted text annotations (out of 33,946 total annotations) available in August 2015.  In this post, I will focus on reporting results of our arXiv paper. Figure 2. January 2015 - dataset us...