Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Herbert and I attended the " 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent " at the Georgetown Law Library on Friday, October 24, 2014.  Although the origins for this workshop are many, catalysts for it probably include the recent Liebler  & Liebert study about link rot in Supreme Court opinions ,  and the paper by Zittrain, Albert, and Lessig about Perma.cc and the problem of link rot in the scholarly and legal record and the resulting popular media coverage resulting from it  (e.g., NPR and the NYT ).  The speakers were naturally drawn from the legal community at large, but some notable exceptions included David Walls from the GPO , Jefferson Bailey from the Internet Archive, and Herbert Van de Sompel from LANL. The event was streamed and recorded, and videos + slides will be available from the Georgetown site soon so I will only hit the highlights below.  After a welcome from Michelle Wu, the director of the Georgetown Law L

Photo credit to my friend  Mona El Mahdy I was thrilled and humbled for the second time to attend Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing ( GHC ) 2014, the world’s largest gathering for technologists women. GHC is presented by the  Anita Borg Institute 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 twentieth anniversary of GHC was held in Phoenix, Arizona on October 8-10, 2014. This year, GHC has almost doubled the number of women who have research and business interests from the last year to be 8,000 women from about 67 countries and about 900 organizations to get inspired, gain expertise, get connected, and have fun. Aida Ghazizadeh from the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University also was awarded travel scholarships to attend this year's GHC. I hope ODU will have mo

(Note: This wraps up the current series of posts about visualizations created either by students in our research group or in our classes. I'll post more after the Spring 2015 offering of the course.) I've been teaching the graduate Information Visualization course since Fall 2011.  In this series of posts, I'm highlighting a few of the projects from each course offering.  (Previous posts: Fall 2011 , Fall 2012 , 2013 ) The final visualization in this series is an interactive visualization of the World Health Organization's global influenza data, created by Ayush Khandelwal and Reid Rankin in the Fall 2013 InfoVis course. The visualization is currently available at https://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/vis/flunet-vis/ and is best viewed in Chrome. The  Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) has been in operation since 1995 and aggregates data weekly from laboratories and flu centers around the world. The FluNet website was constructed to provide access t

UPDATE: Download the latest version of Mink here . The goal of the Memento project is to provide a tighter integration between the past and current web.    There are a number of clients now that provide this functionality, but they remain silent about the archived page until the user remembers to invoke them (e.g., by right-clicking on a link). We have created another approach based on persistently reminding the user just how well archived (or not) are the pages they visit.  The Chrome extension Mink (short for Minkowski Space ) queries all the public web archives (via the Memento aggregator) in the background and will display the number of mementos (that is, the number of captures of the web page) available at the bottom right of the page.  Selecting the indicator allows quick access to the mementos through a dropdown.  Once in the archives, returning to the live web is as simple as clicking the "Back to Live Web" button. For the case where there are too many meme

The Internet Archive (IA) and Open Library offer over 6 million fully accessible public domain eBooks. I searched for the term "dictionary" while I was casually browsing the scanned book collection to see how many dictionaries they have. I found several dictionaries in various languages. I randomly picked  A Dictionary of the English Language (1828) - Samuel Johnson, John Walker, Robert S. Jameson from the search result. I opened the dictionary in fullscreen mode  using IA's opensource online BookReader application . This book reader application has common tools for browsing an image based book such as flipping pages, seeking a page, zooming, and changing the layout. In the toolbar it has some interesting features like reading aloud and full-text searching. I wondered how could it possibly perform text searching and read aloud an scanned raster image based book? I sneaked inside the page source code which pointed me to some documentation pages. I realized it is using

(with apologies to Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, and Dr. Seuss) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, ..." (A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens). At the end of this part of my journey; it is time to reflect on how I got here, and what the future may hold. Looking back, I am here because of answering two simple questions.  One from a man who is no longer here, one from a man who still poses new and interesting questions.  Along the way, I've formed a few questions of my own. The first question was posed by my paternal uncle, Bertram Winston.  Uncle Bert was a classic type A personality.  Everything in his life was organi

Mat Kelly, Justin F. Brunelle and Dr. Michael L. Nelson travel to London, UK to report on the Digital Libraries 2014 Conference.                            On September 9th through 11th, 2014, Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Justin ( @justinfbrunelle ), and I ( @machawk1 ) attending the Digital Libraries 2014 conference (a composite of the JCDL (see trip reports for 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ) and TPDL (see trip reports for 2013 and 2012 ) conferences this year) in London, England. Prior to the conference, Justin and I attended the DL2014 Doctoral Consortium , which occurred on September 8th. The main conference on September 9th opened with George Buchanan ( @GeorgeRBuchanan ) indicating that this year's conference was a combination of both TPDL and JCDL from previous years. With the first digital libraries conference being in 1994, this year marked the 20th year anniversary of the conference. George celebrated this by singing Happy Birthday to the conference and introduced t