Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

                                                                (source:  https://2021.jcdl.org/ ) Due to the global pandemic the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2021) was organized online by the School of Information Sciences of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during September 27-30, 2021. Members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group  (WSDL) attended the workshops , tutorials , paper sessions , posters and demonstrations virtually via Zoom. Muntabir Choudhury wrote an excellent trip report covering the JCDL 2021 main conference. The JCDL workshop, September 30, 2021, on “ Extraction and Evaluation of Knowledge Entities from Scientific Documents (EEKE2021) ” was organized by Dr. Chengzhi Zhang , Dr. Philipp Mayr , Dr. Wei Lu , and Dr. Yi Zhang with an aim to...

To liberally steal a line from Stephen King: "A 6 digit ICQ number fled through the ancient Internet, and Jim sporadically scrambled after it." This is has been the case for well over a decade - probably closer to two decades at this point. I know there's a "7" involved. I think it started with "173." Or was it "178." Human memory is fuzzy like that - we tend to store shape features into long term memory which is very problematic for recalling specific numbers twenty-something years later . In the spirit of celebrating the Internet Archive's 25th birthday (everyone else is saying anniversary but I'm going with birthday because I like to anthropomorphize computer things), I thought it appropriate to share some very special data I was able to dig up from the strata of the ancient web during one of my fits to track down that ICQ number. I was up late one dark and stormy night , most likely training a U-net model for a work project. If ...

Last week, I was discussing my publications with a colleague, and I mentioned that I had a paper published at ACM CIKM 2019 . They were curious about the conference and its 2019 call for papers (CFP) date. I was trying to recall the conference's venue and one of the workshop's names. I remembered that the conference was in Beijing but did not have the other information on hand during the discussion. To help answer these questions, I visited the CIKM 2019 website as linked from  CIKM's page and found a very different website from what I remembered.  Content drift had struck again. This is not the CIKM conference website I was looking for... I discovered that the CIKM 2019 conference proceedings contain proof of my paper publication, a welcome from the conference chairs, paper statistics, lists of committee members and organizers, sponsors, and other papers and workshops at CIKM 2019.  The proceedings do not mention: the conference venue recommended conference hotels CFP...

 "Where were you when the planes hit the World Trade Center?" It seems like everyone has an answer to that question.  On 9/11 , my mom was visiting my grandparents in a small town in Wisconsin. My dad was stationed in Korea and called my mom to turn on the news. She was standing in my grandparents' living room, on the phone with my dad, when she watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.  I was 2 years old, so what I know about 9/11 is from documentaries and stories from my parents and grandparents. The same is true for those in my generation and generations to follow.  With the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 Attack, I was curious how 9/11 was reflected in the Internet Archive. I looked at the captures for 5 major new networks on September 11, 2001: CNN ,  Fox News ,  MSNBC ,  Washington Post , and  NY Times . The first plane hit at 8:46 am and the earliest capture from those websites came from CNN at 8:03 pm, almost 12 hours later. These ...

  "Even though the documents on the Internet are the easy documents to collect and archive, the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone." -- Brewster Kahle, November, 1996 Researchers from the Internet Archive , Protocol Labs , and Old Dominion University will revisit the question “how long does a web page last?”  The answer frequently given is 44 , 75 , or 100 days, all of which stem from research that dates back to 1996--2003.  It is well-known that “44-100 days on average” does not capture the complexity of HTTP activity, but it is an easy to remember scalar number that people can understand.  Much of the circulating knowledge regarding this question comes from the 1990s and early 2000s, before the large-scale adoption of JavaScript in web pages for dynamically producing content and the proliferation of native mobile apps (e.g., the release of the iPhone in 2007 ).   The Filecoin Foundation has generously funded ($75k) this yea...