Characterising the IIIF and Linked Art communities: survey report

This report presents the findings and analysis of a survey conducted between 24 March and 7 May 2023, exploring the socio-technical characteristics of two prevalent community-driven initiatives in Digital Humanities, namely the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and Linked Art. With 79 participants, the survey investigates the practices and activities of individuals involved in these initiatives, which focus on developing and maintaining shared application programming interfaces (APIs) for enhanced interoperability and access to cultural heritage resources. It also seeks to situate these initiatives within a broader discourse of scholarly movements and principles. Additionally, it serves as a preliminary means of exploring the prospective impact of Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) and its underlying design principles in the cultural heritage field

MementoMap: A Web Archive Profiling Framework for Efficient Memento Routing

With the proliferation of public web archives, it is becoming more important to better profile their contents, both to understand their immense holdings as well as to support routing of requests in Memento aggregators. A memento is a past version of a web page and a Memento aggregator is a tool or service that aggregates mementos from many different web archives. To save resources, the Memento aggregator should only poll the archives that are likely to have a copy of the requested Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). Using the Crawler Index (CDX), we generate profiles of the archives that summarize their holdings and use them to inform routing of the Memento aggregator’s URI requests. Additionally, we use full text search (when available) or sample URI lookups to build an understanding of an archive’s holdings. Previous work in profiling ranged from using full URIs (no false positives, but with large profiles) to using only top-level domains (TLDs) (smaller profiles, but with many false positives). This work explores strategies in between these two extremes. For evaluation we used CDX files from Archive-It, UK Web Archive, Stanford Web Archive Portal, and Arquivo.pt. Moreover, we used web server access log files from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, UK Web Archive, Arquivo.pt, LANL’s Memento Proxy, and ODU’s MemGator Server. In addition, we utilized historical dataset of URIs from DMOZ. In early experiments with various URI-based static profiling policies we successfully identified about 78% of the URIs that were not present in the archive with less than 1% relative cost as compared to the complete knowledge profile and 94% URIs with less than 10% relative cost without any false negatives. In another experiment we found that we can correctly route 80% of the requests while maintaining about 0.9 recall by discovering only 10% of the archive holdings and generating a profile that costs less than 1% of the complete knowledge profile. We created MementoMap, a framework that allows web archives and third parties to express holdings and/or voids of an archive of any size with varying levels of details to fulfil various application needs. Our archive profiling framework enables tools and services to predict and rank archives where mementos of a requested URI are likely to be present. In static profiling policies we predefined the maximum depth of host and path segments of URIs for each policy that are used as URI keys. This gave us a good baseline for evaluation, but was not suitable for merging profiles with different policies. Later, we introduced a more flexible means to represent URI keys that uses wildcard characters to indicate whether a URI key was truncated. Moreover, we developed an algorithm to rollup URI keys dynamically at arbitrary depths when sufficient archiving activity is detected under certain URI prefixes. In an experiment with dynamic profiling of archival holdings we found that a MementoMap of less than 1.5% relative cost can correctly identify the presence or absence of 60% of the lookup URIs in the corresponding archive without any false negatives (i.e., 100% recall). In addition, we separately evaluated archival voids based on the most frequently accessed resources in the access log and found that we could have avoided more than 8% of the false positives without introducing any false negatives. We defined a routing score that can be used for Memento routing. Using a cut-off threshold technique on our routing score we achieved over 96% accuracy if we accept about 89% recall and for a recall of 99% we managed to get about 68% accuracy, which translates to about 72% saving in wasted lookup requests in our Memento aggregator. Moreover, when using top-k archives based on our routing score for routing and choosing only the topmost archive, we missed only about 8% of the sample URIs that are present in at least one archive, but when we selected top-2 archives, we missed less than 2% of these URIs. We also evaluated a machine learning-based routing approach, which resulted in an overall better accuracy, but poorer recall due to low prevalence of the sample lookup URI dataset in different web archives. We contributed various algorithms, such as a space and time efficient approach to ingest large lists of URIs to generate MementoMaps and a Random Searcher Model to discover samples of holdings of web archives. We contributed numerous tools to support various aspects of web archiving and replay, such as MemGator (a Memento aggregator), Inter- Planetary Wayback (a novel archival replay system), Reconstructive (a client-side request rerouting ServiceWorker), and AccessLog Parser. Moreover, this work yielded a file format specification draft called Unified Key Value Store (UKVS) that we use for serialization and dissemination of MementoMaps. It is a flexible and extensible file format that allows easy interactions with Unix text processing tools. UKVS can be used in many applications beyond MementoMaps

Interrogating the politics and performativity of web archives

Since the mid-1990s institutions such as national libraries and the Internet Archive have been ‘archiving the Web’ through the harvesting, collection and preservation of ‘web objects’ (e.g. websites, web pages, social media) in web archives [55]. Much of the focus of the web archiving community has been on the continued development of technologies and practices for web collection development [38], with an increased attention in recent years on facilitating the scholarly use of web archives [25, 24, 61]. This research will take a step back to consider the place of web archives in light of ‘the archival turn’ and emergent questions over the ever- expansive role of the archive and the Web in everyday life. First coined by Stoler [81], ‘the archival turn’ denotes a shift from ‘archive as source’ to ‘archive as subject,’ signalling wide-ranging epistemological questions concerning the role of the archive (and the archivist) in shaping and legitimising knowledge and particular ways of knowing. This research proposes to re-situate web archives as places of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, by implicating both the web archivist and the technologies in the shaping of the ‘politics of ephemerality’ [82] that lead to the creation and maintenance of web archives. This study will identify key underlying assumptions about what the Web is (e.g. a ‘Web of Documents,’ ‘abstract information space’), what of the contemporary Web is (or isn’t) being archived, and the relative affordances for web archival practice and scholarly use. Furthermore, drawing on critical approaches to information, Science and Technology Studies and Web Science, this research will engage with the performativity of web archiving, the practices of selection, collection and classification, and the possible implications for a socio-technical understanding of web archives

Making Presentation Math Computable

This Open-Access-book addresses the issue of translating mathematical expressions from LaTeX to the syntax of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). Over the past decades, especially in the domain of Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), LaTeX has become the de-facto standard to typeset mathematical formulae in publications. Since scientists are generally required to publish their work, LaTeX has become an integral part of today's publishing workflow. On the other hand, modern research increasingly relies on CAS to simplify, manipulate, compute, and visualize mathematics. However, existing LaTeX import functions in CAS are limited to simple arithmetic expressions and are, therefore, insufficient for most use cases. Consequently, the workflow of experimenting and publishing in the Sciences often includes time-consuming and error-prone manual conversions between presentational LaTeX and computational CAS formats. To address the lack of a reliable and comprehensive translation tool between LaTeX and CAS, this thesis makes the following three contributions. First, it provides an approach to semantically enhance LaTeX expressions with sufficient semantic information for translations into CAS syntaxes. Second, it demonstrates the first context-aware LaTeX to CAS translation framework LaCASt. Third, the thesis provides a novel approach to evaluate the performance for LaTeX to CAS translations on large-scaled datasets with an automatic verification of equations in digital mathematical libraries. This is an open access book

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project