Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On July 13, I saw this on Twitter: On Monday, doctors, nurses and researchers will lose access to a trove of medical data, as the Trump Administration shuts down the National Guidelines Clearinghouse. See our piece today, by our Senior Investigator @j0ncampbell , in @TheDailyBeast : https://t.co/Qz1tkRIQIM — Sunlight Web Integrity Project (@SunWebIntegrity) July 12, 2018 There are two US government websites in danger, the National Guideline Clearinghouse ( https://www.guideline.gov ) and the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse ( https://qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov ). Both store medical guidelines. Both will "not be available after July 16, 2018". According to the linked Daily Beast article above: Medical guidelines are best thought of as cheatsheets for the medical field, compiling the latest research in an easy-to-use format. When doctors want to know when they should start insulin treatments, or how best to manage an HIV patient in unstable housing — even somet

(Previous semester highlights posts: Spring 2017 , Spring 2016 , Spring 2015 , Spring/Fall 2013 , Fall 2012 , Fall 2011 ) Here are a few projects that I'd like to highlight from Fall 2017. (All class projects are listed in my InfoVis Gallery .)  All of the projects were implemented using the D3.js library. World Leader Interactions on Social Media (Twitter)  Created by Grant Atkins This project (available at http://www.cs.odu.edu/~gatkins/world-leader-vis/app/ ) provides an interactive dashboard to visualize ways Twitter list data can be used and represented. This visualization uses the World Leaders list on Twitter , with the addition of a few world leaders not on the list, to derive information and visualize shared information among these users. The goal of this visualization is to show shared term usage among world leaders, see which times tweets are more likely to be sent out, the sentiment of the users, and the decay of data allocated in a static decreasing tim

At iPres 2018 , I will be presenting "The Many Shapes of Archive-It", a paper that focuses on some structural features inherent in Archive-It collections. The paper is now available as a preprint on arXiv . As part of the data gathering for " The Many Shapes of Archive-It ", and also as part of the development the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit , I had to write code that extracts metadata and seeds from public Archive-It collections. This capability will be useful to several aspects of our storytelling and summarization work , so I used the knowledge gained from those projects and produced a standalone Python library named Archive-It Utilities (AIU) . This library is currently in alpha status, but is already being used with upcoming projects. The metadata available from an Archive-It collection Archive-It curators can use the predefined metadata fields of Dublin core. They can also supply their own custom metadata fields. An screenshot of Archive-It collecti

Inspired by AlNoamany's work from " Detecting off-topic pages within TimeMaps in Web archives " I am pleased to announce an alpha release of the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit (OTMT). The results of testing with this software will be presented at iPres 2018 and those results are now available as a preprint . Web archive collections are created with a specific purpose in mind. A curator will supply seeds for the collection and create multiple versions of these seeds in order to study the evolution of a web page over time. This is valuable for following the changes in an organization or the events in a news story. Unfortunately, depending on the curator's intent, sometimes these seeds go off-topic. Because web archive crawling software has no way to know that a page is off-topic, these mementos are added to the collection. Below I list a few examples of off-topic pages within Archive-It collections. This memento from the Human Rights collection at Archive-It create