Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Mat Kelly taught CS418 - Web Programming at Old Dominion University in Spring 2015. This blog post highlights some teaching methods and technologies used (namely, Docker and GitHub) and how he integrated their usage into the flow of the course.                            For Spring Semester at Old Dominion University I taught CS418 - Web Programming with some updated methods and content. This course has been previously taught by various members of ODU WS-DL ( 2014 , 2013 , 2012 ). The first deviation from previous offerings of the course was to change the subject of the project. Previously, CS418 students were asked to progressively build an online forum like phpBB . Web sites resembling this medium are no longer as common as they once were on the Web, so a refresh was needed to keep the project familiar and relevant. For Spring, I asked students to build a Question-and-Answer website akin to StackOverflow.com . Being students of computer science, all were familiar with the c

Mat Kelly and various other graduate students in the state of Virginia present their graduate research at the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.                            On Friday, April 17, 2015 I attended the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) Student Research Conference at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in Hampton, Virginia. This conference is slightly beyond the scope of what we at ODU WS-DL ( @webscidl ) usually investigate, as the research requirement was that it was relevant to NASA's objectives as a space agency. My previous work with LaRC's satellite imagery allowed me to approach the imagery files with the perspective a computational scientist. More on my presentation, "Facilitation of the A Posteriori Replication of Web Published Satellite Imagery" below . The conference started off with registration and a provided continental breakfast. Mary Sandy, the VSGC Director and Chris Carter, the VSGC Deputy Director began by describing

In 2010, I decided to again study at the Old Dominion University Computer Science Department for better employment opportunities. After taking some classes, I realized that I did not merely want to take classes and earn a Master's Degree, but also wanted to contribute knowledge, like those who wrote the many research papers I had read during my courses. My Master's Thesis is titled "Avoiding Spoilers On MediaWiki Fan Sites Using Memento".   I came to the topic via a strange route. During Dr. Nelson's  Introduction to Digital Libraries course, we built a digital library based on a single fictional universe.  I chose the television show  Lost , and specifically archived Lostpedia , a site that my wife and I used while watching and discussing the show.  We realized that fans were updating Lostpedia while episodes aired.  This highlighted the idea that wiki revisions created prior to the episode obviously did not contain information about that episode, and emp

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 :