Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Hussein (blue shirt) at the post-defense feast for Dr. SalahEldeen . As we head into exam week, I can't help but reflect that this is the first exam week at ODU since 1980 that does not involve Professor Hussein Abdel-Wahab .  The department itself was established in 1979 , so Hussein has been here nearly since the beginning.  For comparison, in 1980 I was in middle school.  I had the privilege of knowing Hussein both as my instructor for three classes in 1996 & 1997, and as a colleague since 2002.  None who knew Hussein would dispute that he was an excellent instructor with unrivaled concern for students' learning and general well-being. It is fitting that ODU is establishing the Dr. Abdel-Wahab Memorial Scholarship ( http://bit.ly/HusseinAbdelWahabODU ) which will support graduate students.  As of April 11, the scholarship is 58% of the way to its goal of $25k.  I've donated, and I call on all former students and colleagues to continue Hussein's legacy and

The Memento Protocol provides a Memento-Datetime header indicating at what datetime a memento was captured by a given web archive. In most cases, this metadata sufficiently informs the user of when the given web resource existed. Even though it has been established in US courts that web archives can be used to legally establish that a given web resource existed at a given time , there is still potential to doubt this timestamp because the same web archive that provides the memento also provides its Memento-Datetime . Though not a replacement for Memento-Datetime,  trusted timestamping is the process that provides certainty of timestamps for content and can be used to provide additional data to alleviate this doubt. In this post, I examine different trusted timestamping methods. I start with some of the more traditional methods before discussing  OriginStamp , a solution by Gipp, Meuschke, and Gernandt that uses the Bitcoin blockchain for timestamping. Brief Cryptography Ba

Screenshots of world local newspapers from the Local Memory Project 's local news repository. Top: newspapers from Iraq, Nigeria, and France. Bottom: Chile, US (Alaska), and Australia. Soon after the introduction of the Local Memory Project  (LMP) and the local news repository of: 5,992 US Newspapers 1,061 US TV stations, and 2,539 US Radio stations I considered extending the local news collection beyond US local media to include newspapers from around the world. Finding and generating the world local newspaper dataset After a sustained search, I narrowed my list of potential sources of world local news media to the following in order of my perceived usefulness: Paperboy Online Newspapers | US & World Newspapers The Keele Guide to Media on the Internet Online Newspaper Directory for the World Hot Newspapers ABYZ News Links Radio locator Radio Station World Refdesk: NEWSPAPERS - USA AND WORLDWIDE Newspapermap List of Newspapers Allafrica Internati

On March 29-30, 2017 I attended Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2017 ( #pda2017 ) held at Stanford University in sunny Palo Alto, California. Other members of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WS-DL) had previously attended this conference (see their 2013 , 2012 , and 2011 trip reports) and from their rave reviews of previous year's conferences, I was looking forward to it. I also just happened to be presenting and demoing the Web Archiving Integration Layer (WAIL) there as an added bonus. Day 1 Day one started off at 9am with Gary Wolf giving the first keynote on Quantified Self Archives . Quantified Self Archives are comprised of data generated from health monitoring tools such as the FitBit or life blogging data which is used to gain in sites into your own life through data visualization.  Gary Wolf kicking off #pda2017 . pic.twitter.com/X3pUOEddNs — John Berlin (@johnaberlin) March 29, 2017 @agaricus