It was eventful year! In this post we detail news relating to students, funding, dissemination, and courses that occurred in 2022. It has taken three years of my association with Drexel but in 2022 I am happy to finally provide a report of the status of our efforts over the last year.
Students
In 2022, PhD Student Christopher Rauch (@chris_2187) is continuing to explore his research topic and will be the primary Drexel student on our recently awarded IMLS grant.
A new PhD student, Hyung Wook Choi, has joined Chris and I to pursue her PhD, initially exploring semantic disambiguation across domains. Upon starting her trek at Drexel, she was also awarded the Graduate College Doctoral Gold Fellowship.
Funding
After a long period of negotiation, we were ability to solidify a collaboration between Drexel CCI and MITRE Corporation to build upon the “VENOM: Archiving the Dark Web” project. Led by Dr. Justin F. Brunelle on the MITRE end and myself from Drexel, we sought to investigate methods for associating dark web URIs together and be able to provide a persistent identifier to solidify the association.
In late July 2022, I was information that our grant proposal to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) relating to investigating the past and contemporary usage of ads on the web was funded! This collaboration with my PhD advisors, Drs. Michele C. Weigle (@weiglemc) and Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) from ODU, as well as my colleague, Dr. Alex H. Poole from Drexel CCI will support both Drexel and ODU students until 2024 to execute the grant tasks. More information about the grant can be had on the grant summary page.
Dissemination
On the dissemination front, Deanna Zarrillo (@zarrillogical) from CCI’s Scholarly Communication Lab presented our work on an NSF Science of Science: Discovery, Communication, and Impact grant; lead by CCI’s Dr. Erjia Yan (@erjiayan), at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting 2022 in Pittsburgh, PA. The paper, “Collecting Diachronic Affiliation Data for Faculty at HBCUs Using Memento”, described some our efforts at exploring the phenomena of Brain Drain from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) by initially leveraging web archives.
While still completing her MS prior to joining the PhD program, Hyung Wook Choi and I published a poster, “Examining Existing Approaches Toward Semantic Disambiguation” at the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) Conference 2022 in Aalborg, Denmark in July.
In June 2022 at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2022, I helped organize the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) Workshop write-up along with Martin Klein (@mart1nkle1n) from Los Alamos National Laboratory and both Zhiwu Xie (@zxie) and Edward A. Fox from Virginia Tech. At this workshop, we also presented our progress on the above NSF grant with a presentation titled, “First steps in Identifying Academic Migration using Memento and Quasi-Canonicalization”.
Finally, less than a month ago, I remotely presented my full paper, “Aggregator Reuse and Extension for Richer Web Archive Interaction” at the International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2022), which was held in Hanoi, Vietnam. This is the first I have published after this conference, now having completed the DL conference trifecta of JCDL, TPDL, and ICADL.
Teaching
In Winter 2022, I was grateful to be able to teach INFO624 Information Retrieval System for the third time at Drexel. I very much enjoy the course and hope to further incorporate interaction with Elasticsearch in future iterations.
In Spring 2022, I was on research leave after having welcomed my son to the world on March 14, 2022.
Finally, in Fall 2022, I recently finished teaching INFO600 Web Systems & Architecture. This is also my third time teaching this class with each iteration being a different modality permutation: first as face-to-face, second as online due to the pandemic, and thirdly as a cross-listed online/face-to-face course.
Upcoming
In 2023, I will be involved as a Program Chair in helping to organize the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023 in Sante Fe, New Mexico along with Dr. Martin Klein of LANL, Dr. Robert Jäschke of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Dr. Anat Ben-David (@anatbd) of Open University of Israel. It is sure to be an exciting time come next June and I am looking forward to continually being involved in this conference in a new role.
Additionally, at the invite of Dr. Ingo Frommholz (@iFromm), I will be serving as the Publicity Chair on the Organizing Committee of the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2023. More info to come on that conference as we move into the new year.
Lastly, just prior to posting this review in early December I was notified of the acceptance of our proposal, “Using Web Archives to Model Academic Migration and Identify Brain Drain” at the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference (WAC) 2023, to occur in May 2023. More information on this presentation disseminating progress on our NSF-funded grant will be available in the future.
Ongoing
I am happy to continue my involvement with a few endeavors.
For starters, I am still very much involved with Dr. Jane Greenberg’s IMLS-funded LIS Education And Data Science Integrated Network Group (LEADING) project where, in 2022, we had our second cohort of students.
I am also grateful to continue to be involved as a Managing Editor for the International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), where I am focusing on novel approaches toward publicity of the journal for soliciting new submissions. The Managing Editors, the Editorial Board, and a representative from Springer will meet on January 9, 2023 to discuss the state and future efforts for the journal.
In Summary
- One new PhD student (Wook)
- One peer-reviewed full paper (ICADL)
- One peer-reviewed short paper (ASIS&T)
- One poster (ISKO)
- One workshop publication (WADL)
- One workshop organized (WADL)
- Two new grant awarded (IMLS NLG-L, MITRE-Venom) with the latter fully executed
- Two courses taught (INFO624, INFO600)
Acknowledgments
The barriers in publishing a yearly review are rigid and tough to overcome given the many other obligations of academia. For finally getting this post out-the-door I want to thank the motivation of Dr. Jina Huh-Yoo, who has managed to publish her year-in-review while at Drexel, and also the ODU WS-DL research group, who continually publishes such posts each January.