Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

This story started in December, 2017 with  Joy-Ann Reid (of MSNBC ) apologizing for "insensitive LGBT blog posts" that she wrote on her blog many years ago when she was a morning radio talk show host in Florida.   This apology was, at least in some quarters, (begrudgingly) accepted .   Today's update was news that Reid and her lawyers had in December claimed that either her blog, and/or the Internet Archive's record of the blog had been hacked ( Mediaite , The Intercept ).  Later today, the Internet Archive issued a blog post to deny the claim that it was hacked , stating: This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (Reid’s claim regarding the point of manipulation is s

Why visualize individual web pages? A variety of visualizations of individual web pages exist, but why do we need them when we can just choose a URI from a list and put it in our web browser? URIs are intended to be opaque : text from the underlying web resource does not need to exist in the URI. Consider http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00799-016-0200-8. Where does it go? Should we click on it? What content exists under the veil of the URI? Will it meet our needs? Now consider this web page surrogate produced by embed.ly for the same URI: Avoiding spoilers: wiki time travel with Sheldon Cooper A variety of fan-based wikis about episodic fiction (e.g., television shows, novels, movies) exist on the World Wide Web. These wikis provide a wealth of information about complex stories, but if... If we were looking for research papers about avoiding spoilers for TV shows, then we know that clicking on this surrogate will take us to something that meets our information needs. If we