Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Thesis defense, July 29, 2024. Picture courtesy of Dr. Michele Weigle. My master’s thesis, “Surfacing Text Changes in Archived Webpages” explores how users can better find and view changes on webpages in web archives. The thesis contributes to the area of information seeking behavior in web archives, and addressed three research questions.  1. How can we make changes in webpages discoverable and understandable? We presented a change text search interface for web archives that allows users to find changes in webpages. This interface also includes an animated deletion tool and a sliding difference tool, which help users view the changes in context. This part of the thesis was informed by our formative investigation “ User Tasks of Journalists .” We presented this work in our paper, “ Making Changes in Webpages Discoverable: A Change-Text Search Interface for Web Archives ” at JCDL 2023 , and the paper earned the best student paper award. 2. How can we increase efficiency in web archi...

In My Process: From the Field to PhD Candidacy Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, this journey has been unbelievable. To be honest, I mainly came to Old Dominion University to play football in 2020, but then I took Dr. Jian Wu 's CS 450 Database Concepts course which changed the entire direction of my journey. Before the course started he advertised one of his data science  undergraduate research assistant positions at LAMP-SYS (Lab for Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems) , which I then applied for at the beginning of 2022. I have been working with him since, resulting in the publication of two papers to date. On July 18th, 2024 I defended my Master's Thesis titled: "Who Wrote the Scientific News? Improving the Discernibility of LLMs to Human-Written Scientific News" . I am enrolled in the ODU Computer Science PhD Program to continue my research in Natural Language Processing under the supervision of Dr. Wu,  Dr. Jiang , and  Dr. Ash...

I joined the WS-DL (Web Science and Digital Libraries) Research Group at Old Dominion University in the Fall of 2021 . On July 25, 2023, I successfully defended my thesis and will have officially earned my Master's Degree as of the end of August 2023. Before I continue, I would like to thank Dr. Nelson and Dr. Weigle , my advisors, and  Dr. Wu , a member of my thesis committee, for their guidance and feedback throughout this process. This would not have been possible without them and many others!  My Master's thesis was titled "Assessing the Prevalence and Archival Rate of URIs to Git Hosting Platforms in Scholarly Publications". Reference rot in scholarly publications has been well documented by studied including Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot  by Martin Klein et al. (WSDL alum) and Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content  by Shawn Jones et al. (WSDL alum). Anecdotally, we as...

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,...