PhD Candidate - Researcher - Software Engineer

Featured Research Work


Presentation
Improving Collection Understanding in Web Archives
Presented at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2018 Doctoral Consortium

Here I presented work done on my dissertation so far. The doctoral consortium allows me to acquire feedback from the community before I submit my dissertation proposal to the university. Here I propose using a visualization of representative mementos to aide in collection understanding of web archive collections, as inspired by AlNomanay's work.

Blog Post
Wikis Are Archives: Integrating Memento and Mediawiki
Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group Blog

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?

Publication
The Many Shapes of Archive-It
From the Proceedings of the the 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation

We examine different collections at the web archive collection service Archive-It. From here we demonstrate the use of several different structural features that can be used to predict the type of collection.


Recent Research Work


Software Project
Raintale

Raintale is a utility for publishing social media stories from groups of archived web pages (mementos). Raintale uses MementoEmbed to extract memento information and then publishes a story to the given storyteller, a static file or an online social media service.

Blog Post
Raintale -- A Storytelling Tool For Web Archives

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 visualize a small number of mementos selected from an immense web archive collection, allowing a user to summarize and visualize the whole collection or a specific aspect of it.

Preprint
Social Cards Probably Provide For Better Understanding Of Web Archive Collections

Used by a variety of researchers, web archive collections have become invaluable sources of evidence. If a researcher is presented with a web archive collection that they did not create, how do they know what is inside so that they can use it for their own research? Search engine results and social media links are represented as surrogates, small easily digestible summaries of the underlying page. Search engines and social media have a different focus, and hence produce different surrogates than web archives. We hypothesize that groups of surrogates together are useful for summarizing a collection. We want to help users answer the question of "What does the underlying collection contain?" But which surrogate should we use? We evaluate six different surrogate types against each other. We find that the type of surrogate does not influence the time to complete the task we presented the participants. Of particular interest are social cards, surrogates typically found on social media, and browser thumbnails, screen captures of web pages rendered in a browser. At p=0.0569, and p=0.0770, respectively, we find that social cards and social cards paired side-by-side with browser thumbnails probably provide better collection understanding than the surrogates currently used by the popular Archive-It web archiving platform. We measure user interactions with each surrogate and find that users interact with social cards less than other types. The results of this study have implications for our web archive summarization work, live web curation platforms, social media, and more.


I have worked in industry for more than 18 years, participating in many aspects of systems and software engineering.

Now I am a Ph.D. student at Old Dominion University majoring in Computer Science under the guidance of Dr. Michael L. Nelson. My focus area is digital preservation, specifically web archiving.

Above, you can find out more information about my journey through academia.

Below, you can follow me on social networking.