Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Internet Archive & Libyan newspapers logos Colonel Gaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years after taking power from King Idris in a 1969 military coup . In August 2011, his regime was toppled in the so-called Arab Spring. For more than four decades, media in Libya was highly politicized to support Gaddafi’s regime and secure his power. After the Libyan revolution (in 2011), media became freed from the tight control of the government, and we have seen the establishment of tens if not hundreds of new media organizations. Here is an overview of one side, newspapers, of Gaddafi’s propaganda machine: 71 newspapers and magazines  All monitored and published by the Libyan General Press Corporation (LGPC)  The Jamahiriya News Agency (JANA) was the main source of domestic news  No real political function other than to polish the regime’s image  Publish information provided by the regime  The following are the Libyan most well-known newspapers which are all publ...

I’m currently teaching the undergraduate CS 462 Cybersecurity Fundamentals course which is delivered online using a combination of Blackboard and ODU’s Distance Learning PLE (personal learning environment). Although I’ve taught both online and on campus for many years, I was curious as to which institution initially helped to trigger the transition from physical campuses to the virtual environments used today. While people are paying a lot of attention to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) these days due to the sheer size of their enrollment, online learning has been around for quite some time. In the 1990s and 2000s, distance learning using the Internet was embraced by many universities seeking to include alternative modes of instruction for their students. I happened upon this interactive infographic created by a team of Ph.D.’s and NASA scientists at Post University  which depicts “ the Evolution of Distance Learning in Higher Education .” One milestone in the infogr...

I attended a brief portion of IEEE VIS 2016 in Baltimore on Monday and Tuesday (returned to ODU on Wednesday for our celebration of the Internet Archive 's 20th anniversary ).  As the name might suggest, VIS is the main academic conference for visualization researchers and practitioners. I've taught our graduate Information Visualization course for several years ( project blog posts , project gallery ), so I've enjoyed being able to attend VIS occasionally. (Mat Kelly presented a poster in 2013 and wrote up a great trip report .) This year's conference was held at the Baltimore Hilton, just outside the gates of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.  If there had been a game, we could have watched during our breaks. My excuse to attend this year (besides the close proximity) was that another class project was accepted as a poster. Juliette Pardue, Mridul Sen ( @mridulish ), and Christos Tsolakis took a previous semester's project, FluNet Vis , and generalized it...

On December 12, 2008, an Urdu blogger  Muhammad Waris reported an issue in Urdu Mehfil about his lost blog that was hosted on UrduTech.net . Not just Waris, but many other Urdu bloggers of that time were anxious about their lost blogs due to a sudden outage of the blogging service UrduTech. The downtime lasted for several weeks which has changed the shape of the Urdu blogosphere. Before diving into the UrduTech story, let's have a brief look into the Urdu language and the role of the Urdu Mehfil forum in promoting Urdu on the Web. Urdu is a language spoken by more than 100 million people worldwide (about 1.5% of the global population), primarily in India and Pakistan. It has a rich literature, while being one of the premier languages of poetry in South Asia for centuries. However, the digital footprint of Urdu has been relatively smaller than some other languages like Arabic or Hindi. In the early days of the Web, computers were not easily available to the masses of the ...

Source: http://www.masrawy.com/News/News_ Various/details/2015/6/7/596077/أسرة-الشهيد-أحمد-بسيوني -فوجئنا-بصورته-على-قناة-الشرق-والقناة-نرفض-التصريح I remembered his face and smile very well. It was very tough for me to look at his smile and realize that he will not be in this world again. It got worse for me when I read his story and many others who had died defending the future of my home country, Egypt, hoping to draw a better future for their kids. Ahmed Basiony, one of Egypt’s great artists, was killed by the Egyptian Regime on the January 28th, 2011. One of the main reasons that drove Basiony to participate in the protests is filming police beatings to document the protests. While he was filming, he also used his camera during the demonstration to zoom on the soldiers and warn the people around him so they take cautions before they had gunfire. Suddenly, his camera fell down. Basiony was a dad for two kids: one and six years old. He has been loved by everyone who knew hi...

Shortly after beginning my Ph.D. research with the Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries team, I also rediscovered a Hampton Roads folk music non-profit I had spent a lot of time with years before.  Somehow I was talked into joining the board (not necessarily the most sensible thing when pursuing a Ph.D.). My research area being digital preservation and web archiving, I decided to have a look at the Tidewater Friends of Folk Music (TFFM) website and its archived web pages ( mementos ).  Naturally, I looked at oldest copy of the home page available, 2002-01-25.  What I found is definitely reminiscent of early, mostly hand-coded HTML: tffm.org 2002-01-25 23:57:26 GMT (Internet Archive) https://web.archive.org/web/20020125235726/http://tffm.org/ Of course the most important thing for most people is concerts, so I had a look at the concerts page too (interestingly, the newest concerts page available is five years newer than the oldest home pag...