Our October ODU-CS PhD Gathering featured a talk from my PhD student, Tarannum Zaki (@tarannum44.bsky.social), based on our ACM Hypertext 2025 paper, "Web Archives for Verifying Attribution in Twitter Screenshots", preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2510.22939 @phonedudemln.bsky.social @webscidl.bsky.social

Of course, my first post as Associate Dean of the Graduate School at ODU had to pay tribute to the great @ass_deans (@altassdeans.bsky.social).

Javed Ferdous of @webscidl.bsky.social has written a paper summary of @acm-sigchi.bsky.social ACM CHI 2025's “‘As an Autistic Person Myself:’ The Bias Paradox Around Autism in LLMs” by Park, Min, Beltran, and Hayes. ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/10/2025...

To study Twitter is to study archived Twitter. And if you're replaying archived pages, you need to be familiar with the different generations of UIs. Tarannum Zaki of @webscidl.bsky.social explores and classifies the different UIs. ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/10/2025...

Excited to share my internship experience with the @archive.org as a Google Summer of Code 2025 contributor! ✍️ blog post: ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/10/2025... 🙏 @ibnesayeed.bsky.social, @mark.bsky.social, @weiglemc.bsky.social, @phonedudemln.bsky.social, @acnwala.bsky.social, @webscidl.bsky.social.

Faculty search ODU Data Science: Critical Infrastructure and Data Transformation (CID) to Advance National Security T/TT, open rank jobs.odu.edu/postings/24241

Faculty search ODU Data Science: AI-Infused Autonomous Systems for Medicine and Health T/TT, open rank jobs.odu.edu/postings/24399

Faculty search ODU Data Science: Accelerator Science Tenured, associate or full prof jobs.odu.edu/postings/23963

They utilized the timestamp of a tweet to estimate the time that a tweet has been archived. They then established left & right time boundaries to limit search space to make resolving captured tweets from the web archive more efficient. @tarannum44.bsky.social #ACMHT2025 📄 doi.org/10.1145/3720...

1. Reconstruct a tweet URL based on the embedded parameters in a tweet 2. Search @archive.org. Web archives are most useful when the Tweet (or account) is no longer on the live web. - @tarannum44.bsky.social #ACMHT2025

Another reason fake tweets are shared is for satire. 100k likes and no comments is suspicious. How can you tell it's real? Web archives serve as a good src of evidence that it's real. Their goal is to build an automated method for evidence that a tweet is authentic @tarannum44.bsky.social #ACMHT2025

Dominik Soós from @webscidl.bsky.social asks "Can LLMs Beat Humans on Discerning Human-written and LLM-generated Science News?" Their contribs inc. benchmarks & findings, new dataset w/ 362 article triplets, & a novel method to improve perf on open-weight LLMs #ACMHT2025 dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

@tarannum44.bsky.social from @webscidl.bsky.social is up next at #ACMHT2025 describing web archives usage for verifying attribution of Twitter screenshots with a compelling use case of one's love for pineapple pizza. 🍍🍕 @phonedudemln.bsky.social

Dr. Michele Weigle's (weiglemc.bsky.social & webscidl.bsky.social) interview with WAVY about the Computer Science for Teachers Graduate Certificate @ ODU. www.wavy.com/news/educati...

📢🚨🔔 JCDL 2025 has extended the deadlines CFPs: All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time: - Full/Short Paper Submission Deadline: September 12, 2025 - Author Notification: October 31, 2025 - Camera-Ready Deadline: November 14, 2025 2025.jcdl.org/registration/.

DO YOU AGREE??

8 @webscidl.bsky.social classes for Fall 2025: CS 418/518 Web Programming CS 432/532 Web Science CS 433/533 Web Security CS 620 Intro to Data Science CS 625 Data Vis CS 733/833 NLP CS 734/834 Info Retrieval CS 795/895 Foundational Models for Data Science ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/08/2025...

@webscidl.bsky.social's own Lesley Frew! big congrats to @weiglemc.bsky.social for recruiting her. www.odu.edu/article/odu-...

This semester, all of my federal grants were terminated. In a new blog post, I write about the importance of federal funding for academic research and the impact of these cuts. @WebSciDL #NEH #IMLS #NSF ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/05/2025...

The talk draws upon a decade of research on rumors, conspiracy theories, and disinformation to shed light on how the right-wing media ecosystem evolved (in part through the manipulation of digital and social media) and is reconfiguring politics/governance around world www.youtube.com/live/YnJ5o09...

And buy with cash, not credit card

In 2023, we started a project of putting NCAA football team logos over state outlines, because we noticed that Texas teams do this all the time. We took a break during the season, but we're starting back up again. Next up, North Carolina 1/8.

A powerful talk (that should be published in a book essay someday,) going over the different “phases” of rumor and disinformation research of the past decade, with a powerful call to action. @katestarbird.bsky.social is a legend who I am honored to work with www.youtube.com/live/YnJ5o09...

NEW: Google used to warn you when you were seeing low-quality search results. Then, in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election, the company quietly turned that warning off www.platformer.news/google-data-...

I'm giving a talk tonight at UW. Heads up that the subtitle here is a bit of a misnomer. I'm actually going to talk about what my team's decade of research on online rumors reveals about the right wing bullshit machine. If you can't come in person, there's a livestream.

Calling all feds: new info site please share data and stories! #AltGov #AltFam please share #SaveAmerica #StopTrump trumpcostsamerica.com

Upon learning that yesterday would be my last day as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I shared this parting message with my colleagues. The next few months will be frenetic and stressful for them. Here are some things that you can do to help them with the mission ahead. (1)

Introducing 3DLNews2: version 2 of our three-decade dataset of US local news articles built from a 3.5 month-long scraping effort: github.com/wm-newslab/3... * 1995 -- 2024: 4 million URLs (with HTML text) * 14k local newspapers, TV, & radio in 50 states (newsresearch.lab.wm.edu/tools/local-...)

I appreciate the opportunity to present our work on "Robust Links and Link Rot" docs.google.com/presentation...

Our tech report provides additional details not covered in the blog posts: bsky.app/profile/trei... (7/7)

One of the goals for the Saving Ads project was to create a dataset of advertisements from the live web. This blog post describes our process for creating this dataset: ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/02/2025... #WebArchiveWednesday @webscidl.bsky.social (1/7)

In 2023, we started a project of putting NCAA football team logos over state outlines, because we noticed that Texas teams do this all the time. We took a break during the season, but we're starting back up again. Next up, Louisiana. 1/4

Last night I found out that the NSF math postdoctoral fellowship I applied for is being deleted because it does not comply with Trump’s executive orders on DEI in the federal government. I’m going to answer some FAQs and share some thoughts about this ordeal in this thread 1/n

We were able to create a dataset of 279 ads by archiving 17 web pages from SimilarWeb’s top websites worldwide. Dataset of 279 archived ads: github.com/savingads/Re... We also created a web page to display ads from our dataset: savingads.github.io/themed_ad_co... (10/10)

Our new tech report (arxiv.org/abs/2502.01525): "Archiving and Replaying Current Web Advertisements…" describes the archiving and replay problems we encountered while creating a dataset of 279 archived ads. #WebArchiveWednesday @webscidl.bsky.social @machawk1 @phonedudemln @weiglemc (1/10)

Trump’s Orders Could Drain Millions From Universities, but Few Protest Openly - The New York Times www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/u...

“Women.” “Diverse.” “Institutional.” “Historically.” Here are the keywords putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s executive orders wapo.st/4aMAdEz

Here's a text document with the words docs.google.com/document/d/1...

If there is content you want to make sure gets into the queue for archiving, please nominate it here - digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/e...

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

The End of Term Archive team @eotarchive.org crawled millions of federal webpages! If you are worried about a page going down or changing information on it, you can check to see if it is saved in the Internet Archive's @waybackmachine.bsky.social. 1/2

From a journalist friend: Just spreading the word. The CDC is purging data, so people should archive their favorite CDC datasets today, namely ones around race/ethnic diversity, LGBTQ, and reproductive health. Also health data involving climate. The youth risk behavior survey has already gone down.

Heads up, the Biden-Harris White House websites are now archived! If you have an old link that gives an error, you can delete the www . whitehouse in the link (be sure to remove the www) and replace with bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ [rest of your link] bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/news-up...

Louisiana traffic cameras today 👀 #snow #lawx

Snow in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge

Cajun Field in Lafayette, Louisiana

I would love to visit Paris. Which Paris? Paris, France or Paris, Virginia, or Paris, Texas. Welcome to annoying problem of toponym disambiguation Greatness Emmanuel-King (@WMdatascience, @Microsoft) tested a dozen tools for this so you don't have to: github.com/wm-newslab/t... You're welcome!

Summary of top projects from my CS 625 data vis course. Topics included how batting avg corr with winning in MLB, impact of HS degree adjustments in NYC during COVID, and corr of obsesity and poverty in US states. https://ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/01/2025-01-06-data-visualization-class.html

I have a similar opinion of LLMs for coding. It *might* make me more effective because I already know how to code and thus can evaluate its suggestions, but I don’t take the suggestions wholesale. Each AI response needs to be evaluated before it is incorporated.

Grammarly can catch some things, like passive voice, but I only accept its suggestions if the result is “correct” for my usage — meaning I already have writing experience built through years of feedback. I’m not sure how someone without that experience can know that they are using it effectively.