Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  On May 7, 2025,  we  held our fourth annual  WS-DL Research Expo .   We continued the same format as the prior years ( 2024 ,  2023 ,  2022  &  2021 ), with one student from each WS-DL professor giving a short overview of their research.  Links to all the materials (slides, papers, software, data) are gathered in the GitHub  repo , but repeated here are the links for the students and their presentations:   Kritika Garg :  Not Here, Go There: Analyzing Redirection Patterns on the Web Kumushini Thennakoon :  Beyond Gaze Overlap: Analyzing Joint Visual Attention Dynamics Using Egocentric Data Lamia Salsabil :  A Context-Based Ensemble Classifier for Open Access Dataset and Software URLs in Scholarly Documents Akshay Nayak :  Adapting Online Customer Reviews for Blind Users: A Case Study of Restaurant Reviews Jhon G. Botello :  Exploring Large Language Models for Analyzing Changes in Web Archive ...

Hi WS-DL blog readers! I’m Kumushini Thennakoon, an international student from Sri Lanka. I joined the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group at Old Dominion University (ODU) as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Michael Nelson . Fall 2023 is my first semester and I’m very excited to work with the WS-DL research group. I’m happily willing to face challenges that might come across in the very first semester. I’m also working as a Teaching Assistant (TA) this semester for the class CS463/563 Cryptography for Cyber Security which is an interesting subject to work with. During the first semester as a graduate student, I’m taking: CS533 Web Security ( Dr. Michael Nelson ) CS518 Web Programming ( Dr. Jian Wu ) CS620 Introduction to Data Science and Analytics ( Dr. Yi He ) The web security course will start from an introduction to Document Object Model, Javascript, HTTP, security fundamentals and will cover many interesting topics concluding with rehostin...

Drexel CCI and ODU WS-DL will be collaborating in an IMLS-funded project to study web advertisments.       We are pleased to announce that a new collaboration between Drexel University College of Computing & Informatics and the ODU Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group has been funded by the Institute of Library and Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the amount of $149,479. The two-year project, "Saving Ads: Assessing and Improving Web Archives' Holdings of Online Advertisements" is led by WS-DL alumnus Mat Kelly with WS-DL's Michael L. Nelson and Michele C. Weigle and Drexel CCI's Alex Poole as co-investigators. This work will focus on the preservation of online advertisements in the past and help to inform methods going forward. Online ads have a similar, if not great cultural significance as print advertisements. For example, embedded ads for masks since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 depict s...

This year, the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022) was held at Art'otel  in Cologne, Germany from June 20-24, 2022. It was held in a hybrid manner, with participants attending both in-person from Art'otel and virtually from Zoom. Members of our Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group (current and former) presented five papers at JCDL 2022.  Invited Paper -  D-Lib Magazine pioneered Web-based Scholarly Communication  ( Michael Nelson  and  Herbert Van De Sompel ) Investigating Bloom Filters for Web Archives Holdings ( Martin Klein et al.) (WSDL alumni) StreamingHub: Interactive Stream Analysis Workflows ( Yasith Jayawardana et al.) Visual Descriptor Extraction from Patent Figure Captions: A Case Study of Data Efficiency Between BiLSTM and Transformer ( Xin Wei et al.) Memento Validator: A toolset for Memento compliance testing ( Bhanuka Mahanama et al.) Members of WSDL also pr...

Starting in Fall 2021, I've had the opportunity to work on the  CoSAI Project  under the guidance of  Dr. Martin Klein ,  Dr. Michael Nelson , and  Dr. Michele Weigle . The CoSAI Project is working to preserve web-based scholarship including source code. The goal of the project is to make the archival process more accessible to institutions by creating a curation workflow to facilitate the process. As part of the project, we wanted to find a set of code repository URIs that were referenced in scholarly publications. To do this, we decided to extract URIs from PDFs in the  arXiv  corpus which now includes more than 2 million papers . We focused on a corpus of 1.56 million PDFs from April 2007 to November 2021. During an internship at LANL in Summer 2021 , Yasith Jayawardana created code that Robustifies URIs found in PDFs. Part of the code extracts URIs found in PDFs using the PyPDFium2 and PyPDF2 to extract annotated URIs and URIs in the text, respec...

https://xkcd.com/2385/   Profs. Michael L. Nelson , Michele C. Weigle , and Jian Wu have been awarded a $10,000 COVA CCI Academic Curriculum Development Grant ( RFP COVACCI-21-05 ) with their proposal "Web Science and Web Security".  The deliverables of this project will include preparing and packaging for use outside of ODU four existing Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group courses that involve Web Security. Recently, WS-DL’s research and course offerings have moved toward the intersection of the web and security. In the process of developing and delivering our courses, it has become clear that we needed to offer a 400/500 level course focused on web client security .  Given the central role that the web plays in our daily commerce, education, and entertainment, we should be doing a better job producing BS and MS students with expertise in securing web applications. While web security is a significant portion of cybersecurity, it is often overlo...

Last year I collected all the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets that the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( @WebSciDL ) tweeted in 2020 , so I decided to do it again this year.  @TroveAustralia started the hashtag in 2019, then it was later adopted by the IIPC for World Digital Preservation Day 2019 , and since then the IIPC has been the driving force behind #WebArchiveWednesday .  Below I provide an edited list of the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets from 2021 that were about our group, from our group, or retweeted by members of our group.  Many are announcing our own papers, software releases, trip reports, defenses, blog posts, and other contributions.  However, I've made an effort to highlight the work of others as well as provide topical commentary.  In a perfect world, many of my Twitter threads should be converted into blog posts , but finding time to do that has been difficult.  This list should be taken simply as a weekly selection of whatever ca...