Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

My work builds upon AlNoamany's efforts to use social media storytelling to summarize web archive collections. AlNoamany employed Storify as a visualization platform. Storify is now gone . I explored alternatives to Storify in 2017 and found many of them to be insufficient for our purposes. In 2018, I developed MementoEmbed to produce surrogates for mementos and we used it in a recent research study . Surrogates summarize individual mementos. They are the building blocks of social media storytelling. Using MementoEmbed, Raintale takes surrogates to the next level, providing social media storytelling for web archives. My goal is to help web archives not only summarize their collections but promote their holdings in new ways. Raintale is the latest entry in the Dark and Stormy Archives project . Our goal is to provide research studies and tools for combining web archives and social media storytelling. Raintale provides the storytelling capability. It has been designed to vi...

Since 2013, I have been a principal contributor to the Memento MediaWiki Extension . We recently released version 2.2.0 to support MediaWiki versions of 1.31.1 and greater. During the extension's development, I have detailed some of its concepts on this blog , I have presented it at WikiConference USA 2014 , and I have even helped the W3C adopt it . It became the cornerstone of my Master's Thesis , where I showed how the Memento MediaWiki Extension could help people avoid spoilers on fan wikis . Why do Memento and MediaWiki belong together? The "dimensions of genericity" table from " Web Architecture: Generic Resources " by Tim Berners-Lee in 1996, annotated to display the RFCs that implemented these dimensions for the Web. Memento is not limited to web archives. When Tim Berners-Lee was developing the Web, he identified four dimensions of genericity : time, language, content-type, and target medium . HTTP enthusiasts will recognize that three of thes...

We are pleased to report that the W3C has embraced Memento for versioning its specifications and its wiki. Completing this effort required collaboration between the W3C and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Research Library Prototyping Team . Here we inform others of the brief history of this effort and provide an overview of the technical aspects of the work done to make Memento at the W3C. Brief History of Memento Work with the W3C The W3C uses Memento for two separate systems: W3C specifications W3C wiki Memento was implemented on both of these systems in 2016, but there were a lot of discussions and changes in direction along the way. In 2010, Herbert Van de Sompel presented Memento as part of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop (LDOW) at WWW . The presentation was met with much enthusiasm. In fact, Sir Tim Berners-Lee stated "this is neat and there is a real need for it". Later, he met with Herbert to suggest that Memento could be used ...

In 2010, I decided to again study at the Old Dominion University Computer Science Department for better employment opportunities. After taking some classes, I realized that I did not merely want to take classes and earn a Master's Degree, but also wanted to contribute knowledge, like those who wrote the many research papers I had read during my courses. My Master's Thesis is titled "Avoiding Spoilers On MediaWiki Fan Sites Using Memento".   I came to the topic via a strange route. During Dr. Nelson's  Introduction to Digital Libraries course, we built a digital library based on a single fictional universe.  I chose the television show  Lost , and specifically archived Lostpedia , a site that my wife and I used while watching and discussing the show.  We realized that fans were updating Lostpedia while episodes aired.  This highlighted the idea that wiki revisions created prior to the episode obviously did not contain information about that episode, ...

Over the past year, I've been working on the  Memento MediaWiki Extension .  In addition to trying to produce a decent product, we've also been trying to build support for the Memento MediaWiki Extension at WikiConference USA 2014 .  Recently, we've reached out via Twitter to raise awareness and find additional supporters . To that end, we attempt to answer two questions: The Memento extension provides the ability to access a page revision closest, but not over the datetime specified by the user.  As mentioned in an earlier blog post , the Internet Archive only has access to the revisions of articles that existed at the time it crawled, but a wiki can access every revision.  How effective is the Wayback Machine at ensuring that visitors gain access to pages close to the datetimes they desire? How many visitors of the Wayback Machine could benefit from the use of the Memento MediaWiki Extension? Answering the first question shows why the Wayback Machi...

Amid the smell of coffee and bagels, the crowd quieted down to listen to the opening by Jennifer Baek , who, in addition to getting us energized, also paused to recognize Ardrianne Wadewitz and Cythia Sheley-Nelson , two Wikipedians who had, after contributing greatly to the Wikimedia movement, had recently passed.  The mood became more uplifting as Sumana Harihareswara began her keynote, discussing the wonders of contributing knowledge and her experience with the Ada Initiative , Geek Feminism , and Hacker School .  She detailed how the Wikimedia culture can learn from the experiences at Hacker School, discussing different methods of learning , and how these methods allow all of us to nurture learning in a group.  She went on to discuss the difference between liberty and hospitality, and the importance of both to community, detailing how the group must ensure that individuals do not feel marginalized due to their gender or ethnicity, but also detailing how good hosp...