Michele Weigle

ODU Helps Fill Virginia's Need for More Computer Science Teachers By Tiffany Whitfield

@webscidl.bsky.social's own Lesley Frew!

big congrats to @weiglemc.bsky.social for recruiting her.

www.odu.edu/article/odu-...

2025-05-08: Thank you to NEH, IMLS, DoD Minerva, and NSF The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.

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...

A Spotlight on Rumors YouTube video by UW (University of Washington)

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 Spotlight on Rumors YouTube video by UW (University of Washington)

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...

The researchers collected their first data in October 2023 and March 2024. Initially, they were struck by how inconsistently Google showed its warnings. A deep learning model they built to analyze the queries suggested that the warnings should have appeared between 29 and 58 times as often as they did in practice. For motivated conspiracy peddlers, they were easy to evade: just adding quotation marks or a single letter to a query was typically enough to make the banner disappear. The researchers were beginning to collect additional data last September when they discovered something unexpected: Google had stopped showing low-quality banners entirely, weeks before early voting began, without disclosing it.

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.

Trump Costs America Highlighting the real people whose lives have been ruined, the good American jobs that are being destroyed, and the important public goods being lost.

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-...)

WikiCredCon 2025 - Robust Links and Link Rot - Nelson and Alam Robust Links and Link Rot Michael L. Nelson @phonedudemln.bsky.social Sawood Alam @ibnesayeed with: Herbert Van de Sompel, Martin Klein, Shawn Jones WikiCredCon bit.ly/RobustLinksWikiCredCon2025 2024-...

I appreciate the opportunity to present our work on "Robust Links and Link Rot"

docs.google.com/presentation...

I love that you put the “ern” on the right school. We hated being called “Northeastern Louisiana”.

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

(7/7)

2025-02-10: Creating a Dataset of Archived Web Ads The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.

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 (Gift Article) Efforts by the administration to cut diversity efforts and foreign aid have upended campuses. But many university leaders seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution.

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

Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders? National Science Foundation staff have been combing through thousands of active science research projects, alongside a list of keywords, to determine if they include activities that violate Trump’s ex...

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

NSF keywords activism activists advocacy advocate advocates barrier barriers biased biased toward biases biases towards bipoc black and latinx community diversity community equity cultural differences cultural her...

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.

FACT SHEET: Climate and Energy Implications of Crypto-Assets in the United States | OSTP | The White House Climate change is one of the most pressing problems confronting our nation and our world, and President Biden has taken bold steps to address it with legislation and policy. Among the President’s comm...

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...

Traffic cameras showing immense amount of snow in Louisiana

Louisiana traffic cameras today 👀 #snow #LAwx

Snow in LSU Tiger Stadium.

Snow in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge

Cajun Field in Lafayette, Louisiana

Cajun Field in Lafayette, Louisiana