Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive

Ian Milligan. “Finding Community in the Ruins of GeoCities: Distantly Reading a Web Archive.” Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, Vol. 11, Issue. 2 (October 2015). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.This paper provides a brief overview of my work with the GeoCities web archive. Asking the question of “can we find community,” I use it as a case study to explain various methods for distantly reading web archivesSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded this project through an Insight Development Grant and an Insight Grant || Student support forthcoming from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation’s Early Researcher Award program || The University of Waterloo

A global approach to digital library evaluation towards quality interoperability

This paper describes some of the key research works related to my PhD thesis. The goal is the development of a global approach to digital library (DL) evaluation towards quality interoperability. DL evaluation has a vital role to play in building DLs, and in understanding and enhancing their role in society. Responding to two parallel research needs, the project is grouped around two tracks. Track one covers the theoretical approach, and provides an integrated evaluation model which overcomes the fragmentation of quality assessments; track two covers the experimental side, which has been undertaken through a comparative analysis of different DL evaluation methodologies, relating them to the conceptual framework. After presenting the problem dentition, current background and related work, this paper enumerates a set of research questions and hypotheses that I would like to address, and outlines the research methodology, focusing on a proposed evaluation framework and on the lessons learned from the case studies

GeoCities and diaries on the early web

GeoCities was a web hosting service that launched in 1995. It appealed to people because at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, it offered them the ability to create websites about themselves, their interests, and their lives. This chapter examines the character and form of a selection of diaries hosted on GeoCities between 1995 and 2001. In these diaries GeoCities users tested the boundaries between public and private on the early web. The chapter proceeds in four parts. The first part offers some contextual background and the second a discussion of method. Third, I look at web diaries whose creators experimented with self-projection by combining aspects of the diary form with the nascent web technologies that GeoCities offered. Fourth and finally, I examine those GeoCities diaries that--in variety of ways--replicated private, paper-based diaries. This blend of experimental and conservative, and of public and private diary writing provides a valuable window into ways in which identities were negotiated and performed circa 1995-2001

Theory and Practice of Data Citation

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or what value it has. The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing specific issues of data citation. The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201

Issues with archiving community data

Transportation in Indianapolis is evolving. The bicycle, two-wheeled agitator of a similar transportation revolution across the United States in the 1890s, is back. The city landscape, overwhelmingly distinguished by auto-centric design, is increasingly being reshaped to support cycling as the economic impact of these alterations changes perceptions and the cycling movement gains momentum. How to document the impact of an urban landscape in flux from the perspective of a loosely codified community centered on cycling is a considerable challenge worthy of consideration by archivists and information professionals in general

Interoperable intelligent environmental decision support systems: a framework proposal

In this paper, an approach for the development of Interoperable Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems (IEDSS) is proposed. The framework is based upon the cognitive-oriented approach for the development of IEDSS proposed in (Sànchez-Marrè et al., 2008), where three kind of tasks must be built: analysis tasks, synthesis tasks and prognosis tasks. Now, a fourth level will be proposed: the model construction layer, which is normally an off-line task. At each level, interoperability should be possible and inter-level interoperability must be als o achieved. This interoperability is proposed to be obtained using data interchange protocols like Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), which is a model interc hange protocol based on XML language, using an ontology of data and AI models to characterize data types and AI models and to set-up a common terminology, and using workflows of the whole interoperation scheme. In the future, a Multi-Agent System will be used to implement the software components. An example of use of the pro posed methodology applied to the supervision of a Wastewater Treatment Plant is provided. This Interoperable IEDSS framework will be the first step to an actual interoperability of AI models which will make IEDSS more reliable and accurate to solve complex environmental problems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Evolutionary computation and case-based reasoning interoperation in IEDSS through GESCONDA

Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft