Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On July 25th and 26th 2013, the WS-DL group attended the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop that was collocated with JCDL 2013 at Indianapolis, IN. Ed Fox , from Virginia Tech , opened the workshop by greeting the attendees. Then, Andreas Paepcke gave two presentations. The first presentation was entitled: "ArcSpread: Enabling Web Archive Analysis for non-CS experts". In this presentation, Andreas showed how to make the web archive useful outside the computer scientists. ArcSpread uses spreadsheet interface to help the user to gain information from the web archive. ArcSpread started with analysis activities such as filtering, aggregating, classifying, and manual coding. The output product is a spreadsheet that can answer some questions related to specific queries (e.g., Hurricane Katrina) such as: pages with words, images with the term, place/people name, and most frequent names. ArcSpread depends on sheet engine with Hadoop cluster of 60 nodes. The second pres...

The Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group was well-represented at the JCDL 2013 conference – Digital Libraries at the Crossroads . We arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana on Sunday night. While Hany SalahEldeen and I took time on Monday to ready our presentations, Scott Ainsworth and Yasmin AlNoamany presented at the Doctoral Consortium . Scott presented his research on improving temporal drift in the archives, and Yasmin presented her work on creating a story from mementos. Their presentations (and doctoral consortium) are discussed in more detail in their blog posting . Day 1 After opening remarks from J. Stephen Downie and Robert H. McDonald , Clifford Lynch gave the opening keynote of the conference entitled "Building Social Scale Information Infrastructure: Challenges of Coherence, Interoperability and Priority." Lynch posed a series of questions that are influencing the research areas in th...

The JCDL 2013 Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work.  Students present their thesis and research plan and a panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of Digital Libraries provides feedback in a constructive atmosphere.  Yasmin AlNaomony and Scott Ainsworth had the privilege of presenting papers at this year's Doctoral Consortium. Scott Ainsworth, Michael Nelson, & Yasmin AlNoamany User Interaction The first session focused on user interaction and was chaired by George Buchanan .  The session began with Erik Choi presenting his work on understanding the motivations behind the questions users ask in Internet Q&A forums.  Prior work in this area has focused on the use an content of Q&A forums; Erik's work focuses on why users ask questions with motivation, expectations, and the relationship between the them. Yasmin AlNa...

In the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, president Barack Obama held a press conference and discussed the need to keep helping the Haitian community and to invest more in rebuilding the economy. A user was watching the press conference tweeted about it on the 14th of January, and provided a link to the streamed news.  A couple of days later when I read this tweet and clicked on the link and instead of seeing anything related to the press conference, Haiti, or President Obama, I got a stream feed of the Mercedes-Benz Super Dome in New Orleans in preparation for the 2013 Super Bowl. It is worth mentioning that at the time of writing this blog the tweet above was actually deleted, proving that social posts don't persist throughout time as we discussed in our earlier post . This scenario illustrates the problem we are trying to detect, model, and solve. The inconsistency between what is intended at the time of sharing and what the reader sees at the time of c...