Hooded my first two PhD students at the final Drexel CCI Commencement. Congratulations to (the very soon to be) Drs. Choi and Rauch!

Proud to report that my PhD student, Chris Rauch, has passed his PhD defense! 🥳🎓 His dissertation introduces ProEthica, which uses LLMs, ontologies, and case-based reasoning to turn ethics precedents into structured support for human judgment. Slides: matkelly.com/presentation...

I've been trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance between "AI-generated summaries are useful" and the backlash that Dr. Fieisler (@cfiesler.bsky.social), myself, and many others felt at the ACM DL briefly making them default over authors' abstracts in December. ws-dl.blogspot.com/2026/05/2026...

Recently, Sawood (ibnesayeed.bsky.social) & I uncovered a tricky web archiving replay problem. An API call several layers of JS deep had superfluous browser size args that would intermittently load the wrong JSON for the archived HTML ws-dl.blogspot.com/2026/05/2026... (all images/links are SFW)

ABC killed fivethirtyeight.com, pulling down thousands of stories and dashboards. I can bring them back, but I can offer you https://fivethirtyeightindex.com, my new index of everything captured by archive.org.

Proud to report that my PhD student, Hyung Wook Choi, has passed her PhD defense! 🥳🎓 Her dissertation asks: when meanings drift, what do records preserve? It gives a framework for detecting fuzzy semantic change and making it traceable, cited, and reusable. Slides: matkelly.com/presentation...

ArXiv is going to ban researchers for a year if they are caught submitting AI slop. ArXiv told us it's a one strike rule: do it once, you're out. www.404media.co/new-arxiv-ru...

The Internet is disappearing before our very eyes and it’s why we should all support that absolutely critical work of @archive.org

The 2026 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries will take place on October 13–16 in Dallas, Texas, and the call for papers, posters, and more has also been released:

Today is my 𝑑𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑟𝑦 — seven years ago today I defended my PhD dissertation!

Just shared a recap of teaching INFO624 at Drexel this winter. A fast-moving quarter exploring how AI is changing search plus some great student projects and takeaways. log.lab.matkelly.com/info624-2026

Hussam Hallak @hussamhallak.bsky.social of @webscidl.bsky.social describes using Google Sheets to do a bulk upload of URLs to the "Save Page Now" service of the Wayback Machine @waybackmachine.bsky.social ws-dl.blogspot.com/2026/02/2026...

If you are a person who works in social media, and your job requires you to manage an account on Twitter/X, please ask your boss, in writing, to verify that you are required as a responsibility of your position to be on a platform that knowingly creates and monetizes child sexual abuse material …

I'll be presenting "A Vision for Trustworthy Web Archiving" as part of the Va Tech Center for Digital Research & Scholarship Distinguished Lecture Series. Friday, Jan 30, 2026 10am EST @webscidl.bsky.social It will be on Zoom & registration is free: calendar.lib.vt.edu/event/16230235

New blog post: Re-launching COPTR!

Travis Reid @treid803.bsky.social @webscidl.bsky.social summarizes Brenda Reyes Ayala's @brendareyesayala.bsky.social 2025 paper: "Towards a better QA process: Automatic detection of quality problems in archived websites using visual comparisons" ws-dl.blogspot.com/2026/01/2026...

My site monitor just reported that the ACM Hypertext 2026 (@acmht.bsky.social) conference web site is live! I enjoyed attending HT'25 in Chicago & hope to submit a paper (due Mar. 27). I've no affiliation as an organizer but someone you know might also want to target this venue. ht.acm.org/ht2026/

Thrilled to see @ktmac.bsky.social and my paper on robots.txt and infrastructural consent published here!!

Apply for @atbw.bsky.social's Web Archiving School www.archivingtheblackweb.org/apply/

#webarchiving at The Library of Congress after 25 years - a look back at some accomplishments! blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/20...

Maybe just a matter of being one of XKCD's Lucky 10,000, but TIL about the (Java-based) TimeStitch Memento Aggregator from LANL: github.com/lanl/TimeSti... #webarchiving #memento @mementoweb.bsky.social #mementoweb

Now presenting our #jcdl2025 paper exploring IPARO, a decentralized web-archival system on IPFS/IPNS that embeds version links into archived content. We evaluate linking policies and storage/lookup/replay tradeoffs. @ipfs.tech Slides: matkelly.com/presentation... Paper: matkelly.com/papers/2025_...

More good news for the new year! We'll be hosting an official re-launch event for the COPTR tool discovery wiki! Please come along if you can... https://www.dpconline.org/events/eventdetail/579/-/dpclinic-january-relaunching-coptr

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

TIL about github.com/midwork-find..., a DuckDB ext. to query web archive CDX APIs directly from SQL. i.e., query Wayback Machine & Common Crawl CDX APIs like they were database tables! #webarchiving @archive.org @waybackmachine.bsky.social h/t @atomotic.com via @inkdroid.org(merveilles.town/@ink)

My PhD student Chris Rauch presented OntExtract @ #JCDL2025! Web-based NLP w/ PROV-O provenance—comparing manual vs LLM pipelines & track semantic change. Demo: ontextract.ontorealm.net Slides: matkelly.com/presentations/2025_jcdl_ontextract.pdf Paper: matkelly.com/papers/2025_jcdl_ontextract.pdf

The work described in this article was supported by IMLS 🫶 #webarchiving

We also published a blog post on Information Matters, which provides a summary of our process for creating a dataset of 279 archived web ads and the problems we identified while archiving and replaying these ads. (2/9) #WebArchiveWednesday @webscidl.bsky.social informationmatters.org/2025/12/prob...

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency that provides funding for America's libraries, has announced it is reinstating all grants it had previously terminated, including those to libraries and library organizations across the U.S. Read more: https://bit.ly/4496W4V

Trip report for the 2025 ACM Hypertext Conference #HT2025 @acmht.bsky.social @webscidl.bsky.social PhD students Tarannum Zaki, Rochana Obadage, & Dominik Soos and alumni @machawk1.bsky.social & @ibnesayeed.bsky.social attended in September, 2025. ws-dl.blogspot.com/2025/11/2025...

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...

Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... [Short thread]

The proceedings & recordings of the 5 presentations at the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) 2025 Workshop from ACM Hypertext in September 2025 are now live! * Proceedings: ualberta.scholaris.ca/items/02da5c... * Recordings: wadlworkshop.github.io/2025/content... (@ Internet Archive & YT)

please reach out with any tenure-track faculty opportunities in information, media, communication, or interdisciplinary computer science departments 🫡 learn more about me here: yuxiwu.com

Our article "Liberation of LMS-siloed Instructional Data" was just released by the Code4Lib Journal! The work documents our efforts in extracting IMLS-funded bootcamp content from Blackboard for future reuse in library carpentries & for reference by students. 📝 journal.code4lib.org/articles/18462

Folks in digital preservation looking for a chill place to hang out off here - I run a digipres mastodon instance, digipres.club. I try to keep it running well and low stress. All are welcome.

Highly recommend joining digipres.club! Misty and the moderators that help her do a great job of running a chill and interesting place free from all the annoying ads and algorithms of the commercial social media options.

That's a wrap on ACM Hypertext 2025! #ACMHT2025 #HT2025 #HT25 Next year's Hypertext 2026 will be in London at School of Advanced Study at University of London and the British Library. #HT2026 September 8-11, 2026 The theme will be Hypertext as Method.

At #ACMHT2025 day 4, Yavuz Selim Kartal (from @gesis.org) discusses supplementing social media posts with AI-generated summaries, which are perceived as most understandable form of enrichment as compared to metadata enrichment or pull quotes. @acmht.bsky.social #HT2025 📄 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

At Day 4 of #ACMHT2025, Karlijn Dinnissen describes the role of fairness & diversity in user choices and perception of music playlists. * What do end users think makes a fair MusicRec sys? * How does that impact their choices? * How should they be informed? #HT2025 📄 dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Ágnes Horvát highlights in her @acmht.bsky.social keynote that the frequency of certain words in PubMed abstracts has drastically increased due to authors massaging their texts with LLMs. #HT2025 #ACMHT2025

At the #HT2025 Day 3 keynote, Ágnes Horvát asks, "How is science effectively promoted in online social spaces? Does self-publicity online lead to a tangible increase in citations?" When we account for venue, popularity of authors, etc., there still seems to be a net positive.

In his #nht25 prez @ #HT25, David Millard (@hoosfoos.bsky.social) ids the parallels between hypertext & those that will come as a result of gen AI. Who controls meaning? What are the boundaries of text? We typically think of AI as an assistant, the human being's still the wordsmith.

@eastgate.bsky.social describes resurrecting Information Cities at #NHT25 as a narrative, a journey toward understanding, a central theme in open world games like Elder Scrolls or Cyberpunk 2077 #ACMHT2025 #HT2025 @acmht.bsky.social

@drchargood.bsky.social kicks off Hypertext '25 (@acmht.bsky.social) Day 3 w/ the Narrative & Hypertext Workshop #NHT25, a venue for both those new to HT and established projects. Scheduled are 3 paper presentations, a panel, and a debate. #ACMHT2025 nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2025/program...

Our browser extension, ArchiveWeb.page has recently surpassed 20,000 users on the Chrome Web store: chromewebstore.google.com/detail/webre... That's 20k+ users creating their own high-fidelity, interactive web archives, right in their own browsers! If you use ArchiveWeb.page, leave us a review!

@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

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....

In his #ACMHT2025 talk, Mariusz Pisarski asks the questions about Google's AI integration into their search UI stating that research shows that users largely don't click on results at all, but instead rely on the provided summaries. Paper 🔗 dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....