Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On August 9, 2023,  a post on the Instagram (IG) account of the teenage influencer Lil Tay announced the death of her and her half-brother (Figure 1 - right) . Within the following day, Tay's family issued a statement to TMZ, reassuring everyone that she and her brother were alive and safe .  Tay acknowledged that her IG account had been compromised, leading to the dissemination of misleading details about the supposed demise of her and her brother. It's been reported that Meta intervened to regain control of her account, ultimately resulting in the removal of the post. This blog post is about using web archives (specifically, the Internet Archive (IA) and Archive.is ) to find the post that was deleted. Although there were no archived copies, or mementos, that successfully replay the content of the deleted post in IA, there is one memento in Archive.is (Figure 7). Figure 1: A picture of Lil Tay (left) and a screenshot of the post on the Instagram account of Lil Tay announ...

In the Fall of 2019, I joined the WS-DL (Web Science and Digital Libraries) research group at Old Dominion University as a Master’s student under the supervision of Dr. Michele C. Weigle and Dr. Michael L. Nelson . During my master's degree, I was on the thesis option (24 coursework credits, 6 research credits, a thesis, and a thesis defense). As I progressed through my courses and research, I discovered my passion for studying and research and  I realized that I wanted to continue my academic journey and pursue a PhD. I reached out to my MS thesis advisor, Dr. Weigle, to express my strong interest in pursuing a PhD within the exceptional WS-DL group. I applied to the PhD program at ODU and was thrilled to be accepted for the Fall 2020 semester. Since then, I have been a dual-status MS and PhD student, I have been working on completing my Master's thesis while also advancing my PhD studies. Figure 1:Some cherished memories with my incredible support system: advisors, mentors,...