Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Having often wondered why many popular videos on the web are time lapse videos (that is videos which capture the change of a subject over time), I came to the conclusion that impermanence gives value to the process of preserving ourselves or other subjects in photography. As though a means to defy the compulsory fundamental law of change. Just like our lives, one of the greatest products of human endeavor, the World Wide Web, was once small, but has continued to grow. So it is only fitting for us to capture the transitions. What Did It Look Like? is a Tumblr blog which uses the Memento framework  to poll various public web archives, take the earliest archived version from each calendar year, and then create an animated image that shows the progression of the site through the years. To seed the service we randomly chose some web sites and processed them (see also the archives ). In addition, everyone is free to nominate web sites to What Did It Look Like?  by tweeting :

On January 14th-15th, I attended the  Federal Cloud Computing Summit  in Washington, D.C., a recurring event in which I have participated in the past. In my continuing role as the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session lead, I assisted the host organization, the  Advanced Technology And Research Center  (ATARC) in organizing and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing. The collaboration sessions continue to be highly valued within the government and industry. The Winter 2015 Summit had over 400 government or academic registrants and more than 100 industry registrants. The  whitepaper summarizing the Summer 2014 collaboration sessions  is now available. A discussion of  FedRAMP  and the future of the policies was held in a Government-only session at 11:00 before the collabora

The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group's 2014 was even better than our 2013 .  First, we graduated two PhD students and had many other students advance their status: Ahmed AlSum defended his Ph.D. on February 26, 2014 and joined the Stanford University Libraries after his defense.  It was Ahmed that started the WSDL tradition of the successful candidate providing the celebratory lunch (shown in the above picture, as well as several photos from our new WSDL Flickr Photostream ).  Chuck Cartledge defended his Ph.D. on May 30, 2014 (he already had a position with Fulcrum ).  Since Chuck finished after Ahmed, he was responsible for lunch as well. Justin Brunelle passed his candidacy exam .   Yasmin AlNoamany passed her candidacy exam . Hany SalahEldeen passed his candidacy exam . Mohamed Aturban passed his breadth exam . Louis Nguyen passed his breadth exam .   Corren McCoy passed her breadth exam.  Alexander Nwala joined WSDL after completing