Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On February 27-28, I attended the 2015 Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC) in Harrisonburg, VA on the campus of James Madison University.  Two of our graduating Masters students, Apeksha Barhanpur (ACM president) and Kayla Henneman (ACM-W president) attended with me. With the snow that had blanketed the Hampton Roads region, we were lucky to get out of town on Friday morning.  We were also lucky that Harrisonburg had their foot of snow over the previous weekend so that there was plenty of time for all of the roads to be cleared.  We had some lovely scenery to view along the way. We arrived a little late on Friday afternoon, but Apeksha and Kayla were able to attend "How to Get a Tech Job" by Ann Lewis, Director of Engineering at Pedago .   This talk focused on how each student has to pick the right field of technology for their career. The speaker presented some basic information on the different fields of technology and different levels of job po

(Title is an homage to a popular 1980s computer game "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" ) I was recently working on a talk to present to the Southeast Women in Computing Conference about telling stories with web archives ( slideshare ). In addition to our Hurricane Katrina story , I wanted to include my academic story, as told through the archive. I was a grad student at UNC from 1996-2003, and I found that my personal webpage there had been very well preserved.  It's been captured 162 times between June 1997 and October 2013 ( https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cs.unc.edu/~clark/ ), so I was able to come up with several great snapshots of my time in grad school. https://web.archive.org/web/20070912025322/ http://www.cs.unc.edu/~clark/ Aside: My UNC page was archived 20 times in 2013, but the archived pages don't have the standard Wayback Machine banner, nor are their outgoing links re-written to point to the archive. For example, see  htt

Source: Dr. Roger Peng (2011). Reproducible Research in Computational Science . Science 334: 122 Have you ever needed to look back at a program and research data from lab work performed last year, last month or maybe last week and had a difficult time recalling how the pieces fit together? Or, perhaps the reasoning behind the decisions you made while conducting your experiments is now obscure due to incomplete or poorly written documentation.  I never gave this idea much thought until I enrolled in a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered on the Coursera platform. The courses, which I took during the period from August to December of 2014, were part of a nine course specialization in the area of data science. The various topics included R Programming , Statistical Inference and Machine Learning . Because these courses are entirely free, you might think they would lack academic rigor. That's not the case. In fact, these particular courses and others on Courser

Don't you just love reading BuzzFeed -like articles, constructed solely of content embedded from external sources?  Yeah, me neither.  But I'm going to pull one together anyway. Vint Cerf generated a lot of buzz last week when at an AAAS meeting he gave talk titled " Digital Vellum ".  The AAAS version, to the best of my knowledge, is not online but this version of "Digital Vellum" at CMU-SV from earlier the same week is probably the same. The media (e.g., The Guardian , The Atlantic , BBC ) picked up on it, because when Vint Cerf speaks people rightly pay attention.  However, the reaction from archiving practitioners and researchers was akin to having your favorite uncle forget your birthday, mostly because Cerf's talk seemed to ignore the last 20 or so years of work in preservation.  For a thoughtful discussion of Cerf's talk, I recommend David Rosenthal's blog post .  But let's get to the BuzzFeed part... In the wake of the med

On February 2nd, 2015, Rene Voorburg announced the JavaScript utility robustify.js . The robustify.js code, when embedded in the HTML of a web page, helps address the challenge with link rot by detecting when a clicked link will return an HTTP 404 and uses the Memento Time Travel Service to discover mementos of the URI-R. Robustify.js assigns an onclick event to each anchor tag in the HTML. The event occurs, robustify.js makes an Ajax call to a service to test the HTTP response code of the target URI. When an HTTP 404 response code is detected by robustify.js, it uses Ajax to make a call to a remote server, uses the Memento Time Travel Service to find mementos of the URI-R, and uses a JavaScript alert to let the user know that JavaScript will redirect the user to the memento. Our recent studies have shown that JavaScript -- particularly Ajax -- normally makes preservation more difficult, but robustify.js is a useful utility that is easily implemented to solve an importan

Having often wondered why many popular videos on the web are time lapse videos (that is videos which capture the change of a subject over time), I came to the conclusion that impermanence gives value to the process of preserving ourselves or other subjects in photography. As though a means to defy the compulsory fundamental law of change. Just like our lives, one of the greatest products of human endeavor, the World Wide Web, was once small, but has continued to grow. So it is only fitting for us to capture the transitions. What Did It Look Like? is a Tumblr blog which uses the Memento framework  to poll various public web archives, take the earliest archived version from each calendar year, and then create an animated image that shows the progression of the site through the years. To seed the service we randomly chose some web sites and processed them (see also the archives ). In addition, everyone is free to nominate web sites to What Did It Look Like?  by tweeting :

On January 14th-15th, I attended the  Federal Cloud Computing Summit  in Washington, D.C., a recurring event in which I have participated in the past. In my continuing role as the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session lead, I assisted the host organization, the  Advanced Technology And Research Center  (ATARC) in organizing and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing. The collaboration sessions continue to be highly valued within the government and industry. The Winter 2015 Summit had over 400 government or academic registrants and more than 100 industry registrants. The  whitepaper summarizing the Summer 2014 collaboration sessions  is now available. A discussion of  FedRAMP  and the future of the policies was held in a Government-only session at 11:00 before the collabora

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group's 2014 was even better than our 2013 .  First, we graduated two PhD students and had many other students advance their status: Ahmed AlSum defended his Ph.D. on February 26, 2014 and joined the Stanford University Libraries after his defense.  It was Ahmed that started the WSDL tradition of the successful candidate providing the celebratory lunch (shown in the above picture, as well as several photos from our new WSDL Flickr Photostream ).  Chuck Cartledge defended his Ph.D. on May 30, 2014 (he already had a position with Fulcrum ).  Since Chuck finished after Ahmed, he was responsible for lunch as well. Justin Brunelle passed his candidacy exam .   Yasmin AlNoamany passed her candidacy exam . Hany SalahEldeen passed his candidacy exam . Mohamed Aturban passed his breadth exam . Louis Nguyen passed his breadth exam .   Corren McCoy passed her breadth exam.  Alexander Nwala joined WSDL after completing

Earlier this week Herbert brought to my attention Jon Udell 's blog post about combating link rot by crafting search engine queries to "refind" content that periodically changes URIs as the hosting content management system (CMS) changes. Jon has a series of columns for InfoWorld , and whenever InfoWorld changes their CMS the old links break and Jon has to manually refind all the new links and update his page.  For example, the old URI: http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/15/47OPstrategic_1.html is currently: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2660595/application-development/xquery-and-the-power-of-learning-by-example.html The same content had at least one other URI as well, from at least 2009--2012: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/xquery-and-power-learning-example-924 The first reaction is to say InfoWorld should use " Cool URIs ", mod_rewrite , or even handles .  In fairness, Inforworld is still redirecting the second URI to the c

I attended the 2014 Archive-It Partners Meeting in Montgomery, AL on November 18.  The meeting attendees are representatives from Archive-It partners with interests ranging from archiving webpages about art and music to archiving government webpages.  (Presentation slides are now available on the Archive-It wiki .)  This is ODU's third consecutive Partners Meeting (see trip reports from 2012  and  2013 ). The morning program was focused on presentations from partners who are building collections.  Here's a brief overview of each of those. Penny Baker and Susan Roeper from the Clark Art Institute talked about their experience in archiving the 2013 Venice Biennale international art exhibition ( Archive-It collection ) and plans for the upcoming exhibition.  Their collection includes exhibition catalogs, monographs, and press releases about the event.  The material also includes a number of videos (mainly from vimeo), which Archive-It can now capture. Beth Downs