Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

From right to left, Dr. Nelson (my advisor), Yousof (my son), Yasmin (myself), Ahmed (my husband) August 26th marked my last day as a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at ODU , while September 26 marks my first day as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences at UC Berkeley . I will lead research in the areas of software curation, data science, and digital research methods. I will be honored to work under the supervision of Dr. Erik Mitchell , the Associate University Librarian and Director of Digital Initiatives and Collaborative Services at the University of California, Berkeley. I will have an opportunity to collaborate with many institutions across UC Berkeley, including the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) research unit. It is amazing to see the light at the end of the long tunnel. Below, I talk about the long trail I took to reach my academic dream position. I'll recap the topic of my dissertation, then I&

Due to API changes, the old carbon date tool is out of date and some modules no longer work, such as topsy . I have taken up the responsibility of maintaining and extending  the service, beginning with the following now available in Carbon Date v3.0. Carbon date 3.0 What's new New services have been added, such as bing searching , twitter searching and pubdate parsing . The new software architecture enable us to load given scripts or disable given services during runtime. The server framework has been changed from CherryPy server to  tornado server which is still a python minimalist WSGI server, with better performance. How to use the Carbon Date service Through the website , http://carbondate.cs.odu.edu : Given that carbon dating is computationally intensive, the site can only hold 50 concurrent requests, and thus the web service should be used just for small tests as a courtesy to other users. If you have the need to Carbon Date a large number of URLs,

Yesterday, September 12, I went to the University of Virginia to give a colloquium at the invitation of Robin Ruggaber to talk with her staff about Memento, Web Archiving, and related technologies.  I also had the pleasure of meeting with Worthy Martin of the CS department and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities .  I met Robin at CNI Spring 2016 and she was intrigued by our work at using storytelling to summarize archival collections , and was hoping to apply it to their Archive-It collections (which are currently not public).  My presentation yesterday was more of an overview of web archiving,  although the discussion did cover various details, including a proposal for Memento versioning in Fedora .  The Memento Protocol and Research Issues With Web Archiving from Michael Nelson --Michael

@jefferson_bail perhaps a panel idea for the @NetPreserve WAC? “2016: The Year Politics Drove People to Finally Use Web Archives" — Abbie Grotke (@agrotke) August 11, 2016 At the Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group we have been studying web archiving for a long time.  In the past few years, we have noticed a significant uptick in the use of web archives in mainstream media, both to support stories and as the subject.  This post presents articles from the popular media that use web archive holdings ( mementos ) as evidence and concludes with articles about web archives. Articles that Reference Web Archives 'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid What the Washington Post's rush to be the first to report on Russian hackers breaching the US power grid teaches us about how "breaking news" can all too often become "fake news" when we over-

Myself standing at the main entrance of Langdell Hall I was honored with the great opportunity of collaborating with the Harvard Library Innovation Lab (LIL) as a Fellow this Summer. Located at Langdell Hall, Harvard Law School , the Library Innovation Lab develops solutions to solve serious problems facing libraries. It consists of an eclectic group of Lawyers, Librarians, and Software Developers engaged in projects such as  Perma.cc , Caselaw Access Project  (CAP), The Nuremberg Project , among many others .  The LIL Team To help prevent link ro t, Perma.cc creates permanent reliable links for web resources. The Caselaw Access Project is an ambitious project which strives to make all US case laws freely accessible online. The current collection to be digitized stands at over 42,000 volumes (nearly 40 million pages) . The Nuremberg Project is concerned with the digitization of LIL's collection about the Nuremberg trials.  How Harvard digitized nearly 40 million pa

We are pleased to report that the W3C has embraced Memento for versioning its specifications and its wiki. Completing this effort required collaboration between the W3C and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Research Library Prototyping Team . Here we inform others of the brief history of this effort and provide an overview of the technical aspects of the work done to make Memento at the W3C. Brief History of Memento Work with the W3C The W3C uses Memento for two separate systems: W3C specifications W3C wiki Memento was implemented on both of these systems in 2016, but there were a lot of discussions and changes in direction along the way. In 2010, Herbert Van de Sompel presented Memento as part of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop (LDOW) at WWW . The presentation was met with much enthusiasm. In fact, Sir Tim Berners-Lee stated "this is neat and there is a real need for it". Later, he met with Herbert to suggest that Memento could be used