Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I'm way behind in posting about my Spring 2016 offering of CS 725/825 Information Visualization , but better late than never. (Previous semester highlights posts: Spring 2015 , Spring/Fall 2013 , Fall 2012 , Fall 2011 )   Here are a few projects that I'd like to highlight. (All class projects are listed in my InfoVis Gallery .) Expanding the WorldVis Simulation Created by Juliette Pardue, Mridul Sen, Christos Tsolakis This project (available at http://ws-dl.cs.odu.edu/vis/world-vis/ ) was an extension of the FluNet visualization , developed as a class project in 2013. The students extended the specialized tool to account for general datasets of quantitative attributes per country over time and added attributes based on continent average. They also computed summary data for each dataset for each year, so at a glance, the user can see statistical information including the country with the minimum and maximum value. This work was accepted as a poster to IEEE VIS 2

Though scholars write articles and papers, they also post a lot of content on the web. Datasets, blog posts (like this one), presentations, and more are posted by scholars as part of scholarly communications . What if we could aggregate the content by scholar, instead of by web site? Why would we want to do this? We can create stories, or collections of a scholar's work in an interface, much like Storify . We can also index this information and create a search engine that allows a user to search by scholar and find all of their work, not just their published papers, as is offered by Scopus or Web of Science, but their web-based content as well. Finally we can archive their work before the ocean of link rot washes it away. To accomplish our goal, two main questions must be answered: (1) For a given scholar, how do we create a global scholar profile describing the scholar and constructed from multiple sources? (2) How do we locate the scholar's work on the web and use this

Since the advent of the web, more elements of scholarly communication are occurring online . A world that once consisted mostly of conference proceedings, books, and journal articles now includes blog posts, project websites, datasets, software projects, and more. Efforts like LOCKSS , CLOCKSS , and Portico preserve the existing journal system, but there is no similar dedicated effort for the web presence of scholarly communication . Because web-based scholarly communication is born on the web, it can benefit from web archiving . This is complicated by the complexity of scholarly objects. Consider a dataset on the website Figshare , whose landing page is shown in Fig. 1. Each dataset on Figshare has a landing page consisting of a title, owner name, brief description, licensing information, and links to bibliographic metadata in various forms. If an archivist merely downloads the dataset and ignores the rest, then a future scholar using their holdings is denied context and addit