Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I am pleased to report on the successful completion of my Master's Degree thesis entitled "An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Archives of Web Resources Requiring Authentication". The problem that I hoped to resolve with the study was one that plagues software like Archive Facebook , even to this day, in that when the hierarchy a social media website changes, tools created to preserve content on those sites tend to break. By conforming these tools to a specification that is setup to represent the hierarchy of the target social media websites, these tools become adaptive without the need of continuous maintenance on the part of the developer. Also in the study was an exploration and enumeration of various aspects of personal web archiving that prevent the field from taking advantage of the tools, procedures and mediums that are widely used in conventional web archiving. In addition to simply identifying the problem, I also created a Google Chrome extension, W...

Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service, provided by the Internet Archive , that allows institutions and users to create, maintain, and view digital collections of web resources. The current interface of Archive-It is largely text-based, supporting drill-down navigation using lists of URIs. While this interface provides good searching capabilities, it is not very efficient for browsing. This was our motivation for thinking about new visualizations to make it easy for users to browse Archive-It collections. This work, "Visualizing Digital Collections at Archive-It", was the subject of a recent MS thesis by Kalpesh Padia (who is continuing his Ph.D. studies at NC State University ) and a JCDL 2012 short paper by Kalpesh Padia, Yasmin AlNoamany , and Michele C. Weigle . In order to provide a better visual experience to users of Archive-It collections, we implemented six different visualizations (treemap, time cloud, bubble chart, image plot, timeline, and wo...

On Saturday, my colleague, Justin Brunelle , and I took off on a road trip to attend this year’s JCDL conference in Washington, D.C. We arrived at the nation’s capital earlier that evening and began preparing our presentations after settling in at the George Washington University Inn . Both of us were accepted to present our work at the conference’s Doctoral Consortium . Justin has already blogged about the consortium and our experience in his brilliant blog post . The conference started on the following Monday (June 10 th ). The registration went smoothly and we all took our seats at the Betts Theatre in the Marvin Center which sits in the heart of George Washington University . Barrie Howard and Karim Boughida (the conference co-chairs) gave the welcoming remarks and were followed by Leo M. Chalupa , the Vice President of Research at the university. Michael Nelson , opened up the session and introduced the keynote speaker, Jason Scott . Winning the award for the Most “...

The ODU WS-DL research group kicked off  JCDL 2012  at  The George Washington University  by presenting the first two  Doctoral Consortium  papers on June 10th, 2012. The Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for PhD students that are in the early stages of defining their research. It is a venue for presenting a potential path through the PhD, as well as a way to receive feedback from peers and other researchers. Past WS-DL students have benefited from the workshop, including Joan Smith , Frank McCown , Martin Klein , Chuck Cartledge , and Ahmed Alsum . Hany SalahEldeen and I ( Justin F. Brunelle ) were honored and excited to be the next class of WS-DL students to participate. The first session was the Data Preservation and Curation section, chaired by Maristella Agosti . I presented the first paper entitled " Filling in the Blanks: Capturing Dynamically Generated Content ". My work will study capturing, sharing, and archiving Web 2.0 resourc...