Two WS-DL classes are offered for Spring 2016:
- CS 725/825 - Information Visualization, Dr. Weigle
- CS 432/532 - Introduction to Web Science, Dr. Nelson
--Michael
Friday, November 27, 2015
2015-11-28: Two WS-DL Classes Offered for Spring 2016
Two WS-DL classes are offered for Spring 2016:
--Michael
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
2015-11-24 Twitter Follower Analysis of Virginia University Alumni Associations
|
| The primary goal of any alumni association is to maintain and strengthen the ties between its alumni, the community, and the mission of the university. With social media, it's easier than ever to connect with current and former graduates on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter with a simple invitation to "like us" or "follow me." Considering just one of these social platforms, we recently analyzed the Twitter networks of twenty-three (23) Virginia colleges and universities to determine what, if any, social characteristics were shared among the institutions and whether we could gain any insight by examining the public profiles of their respective followers. The colleges of interest, ranked by number of followers in Table 1, vary in size, mission, type of institution, admissions selectivity and perceived prestige. Each of the alumni associations has maintained a Twitter presence for an average of six (6) years. The oldest Twitter account belongs to Roanoke College (@roanokecollege) which is approaching the eight (8) year mark. The newest Twitter account was registered by Randolph Macon College (@RMCalums) nearly two years ago. |
| University | Followers | Joined Twitter |
|---|---|---|
| University of Virginia | 12,100 | 11/1/2008 |
| Roanoke College* | 9,588 | 3/1/2008 |
| Regent University* | 7,966 | 11/1/2008 |
| James Madison University | 7,865 | 8/1/2008 |
| Virginia Tech | 6,418 | 4/1/2009 |
| College of William & Mary | 4,448 | 1/1/2009 |
| University of Mary Washington | 3,847 | 10/1/2009 |
| Liberty University | 3,699 | 11/6/2009 |
| University of Richmond | 3,299 | 5/1/2009 |
| Sweet Briar College* | 2,523 | 8/1/2010 |
| George Mason University | 2,375 | 2/1/2011 |
| Hampton University | 2,372 | 2/15/2012 |
| Christopher Newport University | 2,191 | 8/1/2010 |
| Old Dominion University | 1,996 | 7/1/2009 |
| Randolph College* | 1,857 | 8/1/2008 |
| Washington and Lee University | 1,842 | 8/1/2011 |
| Radford University | 1,758 | 3/11/2011 |
| Hampden-Sydney College | 1,086 | 7/1/2009 |
| Longwood University | 1,035 | 2/28/2013 |
| Hollins University | 923 | 4/1/2009 |
| Virginia Military Institute | 836 | 3/1/2009 |
| Norfolk State University | 629 | 8/15/2011 |
| Randolph-Macon College | 172 | 3/7/2014 |
| Table 1 - Alumni Associations Ranked by Followers * Institution does not have an official alumni Twitter account. The university Twitter account was used instead. | ||
Social Graph Analysis
NodeXL is a template for Microsoft Excel which makes network analysis easy and rather intuitive. We used this tool for data collection to import the Twitter networks and to analyze the various social media interactions. There are limitations established in the Twitter API which regulate the amount of data collected per hour by any one user. Therefore, due to rate limiting, NodeXL will inherently only import the 2,000 most recent friends and followers for any Twitter account. To improve the response time of the API, we further restricted our data collection to the 200 most recent tweets for both the university and each of its follower accounts.
For our first look at the alumni associations, we clustered the data based on an algorithm in NodeXL which looks at how the vertices are connected to one another. The clusters, as shown in Figure 1, are indicated by the color of the nodes. The clusters themselves revealed some interesting patterns. The high level of inter-association connectivity, as measured in follows, tweets and mentions, was unexpected. We would have thought that each association operated within the confines of its own Twitter space or that of its parent organization. As we examine the groupings in this network, it is not unreasonable that we would observe connections between Old Dominion University (@ODUAlumni), Norfolk State University (@nsu_alumni_1935) and Hampton University (@HamptonU_Alumni) as all three are located within close proximity of one another in the Hampton Roads area. But, then we must take notice of Hollins University (@HollinsAlum), a small, private women's college in Roanoke, VA, which has a connection with ten (10) other alumni associations; more connections than any other school. Hollins is one of the smallest universities in our group with enrollment of less than 800 students. Since Twitter is primarily about influence, in this instance, we can probably assume the follows serve as a means to observe best practices and current engagement trends employed by larger institutions. While Hollins University is well connected, as are many of the other schools, at the opposite end of the spectrum we find Liberty University (@LibertyUAlum), a large school with more than 77,000 students. Liberty University remains totally isolated with no follower connections to the other alumni associations. You might minimally expect some type of connection with either Regent University (@RegentU) since both share a similar mission as private, Christian institutions or other universities within close physical proximity such as Randolph College (@randolphcollege).
 |
| Figure 1 - Connectivity of Alumni Associations |
Twitter Followers, Enrollment, and Selectivity
We normally measure the popularity of a Twitter account based on the number of followers. Instead of simply quantifying the follower counts of each alumni association, we sought to understand if certain factors, actions or inherent qualities about the institution might influence the relative number of followers. First, we considered whether more active tweeters would attract more alumni followers. As shown in Figure 2, the College of William and Mary (@wmalumni) has generated the most tweets over its lifetime, approximately 6,200 or 2.5 tweets per day. But, we also observe the University of Mary Washington (@UMaryWash), which has approximately half the student enrollment, a similar Twitter life span, 50% percent less tweets at 2,800 or 1.3 per day, with only a slight difference in the number of followers, 4,400 versus 3,800 respectively. While the graph shows that schools such as Virginia Tech (@vt_alumni) and the University of Virginia (@UVA_Alumni) have more followers with fewer lifetime tweets, the caveat is that these public institutions have the benefit of considerably larger student populations which inherently increases the pool of potential alumni.
 |
| Figure 2 - Lifetime Tweets Versus Followers |
Next, we considered whether a higher graduation rate, or alumni production, would result in more followers. We obtained the most recent, 2014 overall graduation rates for each institution from the National Center for Education Statistics, with reported overall six-year graduation rates ranging from 34% to 94%. A 2015 Pew Research Center study of the Demographics of Social Media Users indicates that among all internet users, 32% in the 18 to 29 age range use Twitter. This is a key demographic as we would expect our alumni associations to be primarily focused on attracting recent undergraduates. We also factored in selectivity, a comparative scoring of the admissions process, using the categories defined in the 2016 U.S. News Best Colleges Directory. In this directory, colleges are designated as most selective, more selective, selective, less selective or least selective based on a formula.
As we look at Figure 3, we observe a positive correlation between admissions selectivity and the institution's overall graduation rate. Schools which were least selective during the admissions phase also produced the lowest graduation rates (less than 40%) while schools which were most selective, experienced the highest graduation rates (around 90%). It isn't surprising that improved graduation rates positively affect the expected number of alumni Twitter followers. We'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to extrapolate how closely each institution's annual undergraduate enrollment, graduation rate and expected level of engagement on Twitter corresponds to the actual number of followers when all three factors are considered.
 |
| Figure 3 - Followers Versus Graduation Rate |
Potential Reach of Verified Followers
Users on Twitter want to be followed so we looked carefully at who, besides alumni and students, was following each of the alumni associations. Specifically, we noted the number of Twitter verified followers; accounts which are usually associated with high-profile users in "music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business and other key interest areas." In addition to an abundance of local news reporters and sports anchors, regional politicians and career sites, other notable followers included: restaurant review site Zagat (@Zagat), automaker Toyota USA (@toyota), musician and rapper DJ King Assassin (@DjKingAssassin), the Nelson Mandela Foundation (@NelsonMandela), the President of the United States Barack Obama (@BarackObama), Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe (@GovernorVA) and artist and singer Yoko Ono (@yokoono). It's a safe assumption that some of the follower relationships with verified users were probably established prior to 2013. This is the year in which Twitter instituted new rules to kill the "auto follow" which was a programmatic way of following another user back after they follow you. Either way, the open question would remain as to why these particular users would follow an alumni association when there are no readily apparent educational ties.
Twitter doesn't take follower count into consideration when verifying an account, but it's not unusual for a verified account to have a considerable following. Since the mission of an alumni association is essentially about networking and information dissemination, we also measured the potential reach or level of influence across the followers' extended network obtained from the verified accounts. No single university had more than 70 verified accounts among its followers. However, when we look at their contribution, in Figure 4, as a percentage of the combined reach achieved by all followers of each alumni association, these select users accounted for as little as 1.6% for Virginia Military Institute (@vmialumni) to as much as 95.8% for Longwood University (@acaptainforlife) of the institution's total potential reach (i.e., followers of my followers).
 |
| Figure 4 - Potential Reach Percentage of Verified Accounts |
Alumni Sentiment
Finally, we examined how each follower described himself in the description (i.e., bio) portion of their Twitter profile by extracting the top 200 most frequently occurring terms for each alumni association. A word cloud for the alumni of each university is shown in Figure 5. If we further isolated the descriptions to the top ten most frequently occurring words, we observed a common pattern among all alumni followers. In addition to the official or some derivative of the institution name (e.g., JMU, NSU, Tech), we find the terms love, life, and some intimate description of the follower as a mom, husband, student, father or alumni. If the university has an athletic department, we also found mention of sports and, in the case of our two Christian universities, Liberty and Regent, the terms God, Jesus, and Christ were prevalent. In 22 of 23 institutions, the alumni primarily described themselves using these personal terms. Conversely, the alumni followers at only one institution, the University of Richmond (@urspidernetwork), described themselves in a more business-like or academic manner with more frequent mention of the words PhD, career, and job.
Figure 5 - Word Clouds of Twitter Follower Descriptions
-- Corren McCoy
Thursday, November 5, 2015
2015-11-06: iPRES2015 Trip Report
Cal Lee and Helen Tibbo opened the conference with a welcome on November 3rd, followed by Nancy McGovern's keynote address delivered with Leo Konstantelos and Maureen Pennock. This was not a traditional keynote, but instead an interactive dialogue in which several challenge areas were presented to the audience, and the audience responded -- live and on twitter -- significant achievements or advances in those challenge areas from #lastyear. For example, Dr. Nelson identified the #iCanHazMemento utility. The responses are available on Google Docs.
— Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) November 3, 2015
I attended the Institutional Opportunities and Challenges session to open the conference. Kresimir Duretec presented "Benchmarks for Digital Preservation Tools." His presentation touched on how we can get digital preservation tools that "Just Work", including benchmarks for evaluating tools on test beds and measuring them for quality. Related to this is Mat Kelly's work on the Archival Acid Test.
Another web archiving tool comparison from @WebSciDL -- archival acid test #ipres2015 https://t.co/oNEJgJHXyy
— Justin F Brunelle (@justinfbrunelle) November 3, 2015
Alex Thirifays presented "Towards a Common Approach for Access to Digital Archival Records in Europe." This paper touched on user access: user needs, best practices for identifying requirements for access, and a capability gaps analysis of current tools versus user needs.
"Developing a Highly Automated Web Archive System Based
on IIPC Open Source Software" was presented by Zhenxin Wu. Her paper outlined a framework of open source tools to archive the web using Heritrix and a SOLR index of WARCS with an enhanced interface.
Barbara Sierman closed the session with her presentation "Best Until ... A National Infrastructure for Digital Preservation in the Netherlands" focusing on user accessibility and organizational challenges as part of a national strategy for preserving digital and cultural Dutch heritage.
After lunch, I lead off the Infrastructure Opportunities and Challenges session with my paper on Archiving Deferred Representations Using a Two-Tiered Crawling Approach. We defined deferred representations as those that rely on JavaScript to load embedded resources on the client. We show that archives can use PhantomJS to create a 1.5 times larger crawl frontier than Heritrix itself, but PhantomJS crawls 10.5 times slower. We recommend using a classifier to recognize deferred representations and only use it to crawl deferred representations, mitigating the crawl slow-down while still reaping the benefits of the headless crawler.
iPRES2015: Archiving Deferred Representations Using a Two-Tiered Crawling Approach from Justin Brunelle
Day 2 concluded with the poster session (including a poster by Martin Klein) and reception.
Pam Samuelson opened Day 3 with her keynote Mass Digitization of Cultural Heritage: Can Copyright Obstacles Be Overcome? Her keynote touched on the challenges with preserving cultural heritage introduced by copyright, along with some of the emerging techniques to overcome the challenges. She identified duration of copyright as a major contributor to the challenges of cultural preservation. She notes that most countries have exceptions for libraries and archives for preservation purposes, and explains recent U.S. evolutions in fair use through the Google Books rulings.
After Samuelson's keynote, I concluded my iPRES2015 visit and explored Chapel Hill, including a visit to the Old Well (at the top of this post) and an impromptu demo of the pit simulation. It was very scary.
Several themes emerged from iPRES2015, including an increased emphasis on web archiving and a need to improved context, provenance, and access for digitally preserved resources. I look forward to monitoring the progress in these areas.
Douglas Thain followed with his presentation on "Techniques for Preserving Scientific Software Executions: Preserve the Mess or Encourage Cleanliness?" Similar to our work with deferred representations, his work focuses on scientific replay of simulations and software experiments. He presents several tools as part of a framework for preserving the context of simulations and simulation software, including dependencies and build information.
Hao Xu presented "A Method for the Systematic Generation of Audit Logs in a Digital Preservation Environment and Its Experimental Implementation In a Production Ready System". His presentation focuses on a construction of a finite state machine to understand whether a repository is following compliance policies for auditing purposes.
Jessica Trelogan and Lauren Jackson presented their paper Preserving an Evolving Collection: "“On-The-Fly” Solutions for the Chora of Metaponto Publication Series." They discussed the storage of complex artifacts of ongoing research projects in archeology with the intent of improving sharability of the collections.
To wrap up Day 1, we attended a panel on Preserving Born-Digital News consisting of Edward McCain, Hannah Sommers, Christie Moffatt, Abigail Potter (moderator), Stéphane Reecht, and Martin Klein. Christie Moffatt identified the challenges with archiving born-digital news material, including the challenges with scoping a corpus. She presented their case study on the Ebola response. Stéphane Reecht presented the work by the BnF regarding their work to perform massive, once-a-year crawls as well as selective, targeted daily crawls. Hannah Sommers provided insight into the culture of a news producer (NPR) on digital preservation. Martin Klein presented SoLoGlo (social, local, and global) news preservation, including citing statistics about the preservation of links shortened by the LA Times. Finally, Edward McCain discussed the ephemeral nature of born-digital news media, and provided examples of the sparse number of mementos in news pages in the Wayback Machine.
Hao Xu presented "A Method for the Systematic Generation of Audit Logs in a Digital Preservation Environment and Its Experimental Implementation In a Production Ready System". His presentation focuses on a construction of a finite state machine to understand whether a repository is following compliance policies for auditing purposes.
Jessica Trelogan and Lauren Jackson presented their paper Preserving an Evolving Collection: "“On-The-Fly” Solutions for the Chora of Metaponto Publication Series." They discussed the storage of complex artifacts of ongoing research projects in archeology with the intent of improving sharability of the collections.
To wrap up Day 1, we attended a panel on Preserving Born-Digital News consisting of Edward McCain, Hannah Sommers, Christie Moffatt, Abigail Potter (moderator), Stéphane Reecht, and Martin Klein. Christie Moffatt identified the challenges with archiving born-digital news material, including the challenges with scoping a corpus. She presented their case study on the Ebola response. Stéphane Reecht presented the work by the BnF regarding their work to perform massive, once-a-year crawls as well as selective, targeted daily crawls. Hannah Sommers provided insight into the culture of a news producer (NPR) on digital preservation. Martin Klein presented SoLoGlo (social, local, and global) news preservation, including citing statistics about the preservation of links shortened by the LA Times. Finally, Edward McCain discussed the ephemeral nature of born-digital news media, and provided examples of the sparse number of mementos in news pages in the Wayback Machine.
Marin Klein from UCLA Libraries speaking about the SoLoGlo social media project #ipres2015 #savenews pic.twitter.com/nWf6sXQX1a
— Edward McCain (@e_mccain) November 3, 2015
To kick off Day 2, Lisa Nakamura gave her opening keynote The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Public Feminism and Open Access. Her talk focused on the role of Tumblr in curating and sharing a book no longer in print as a way to open the dialogue on the role of piracy and curation in the "wild" to support open access and preservation.
I attended the Dimensions of Digital Preservation session, which began with Liz Lyon's presentation on "Applying Translational Principles to Data Science Curriculum Development." Her paper outlines a study to help revise the University of Pittsburgh's data science curriculum. Nora Mattern took over the presentation to discuss the expectations of the job market to identify the skills required to be a professional data scientist.
Elizabeth Yakel presented "Educational Records of Practice: Preservation and Access Concerns." Her presentation outlined the unique challenges with preserving, curating, and making available educational data. Education researchers or educators can use these resources to further their education, reuse materials, and teach the next generation of teachers.
Emily Maemura presented "A Survey of Organizational Assessment Frameworks in Digital Preservation." She presented the results of a survey focusing on frameworks for assessment models, drawing conclusions like software maturity models do for computer scientists. Further, her paper identifies trends, gaps, and models for assessment.
Matt Schultz, Katherine Skinner, and Aaron Trehub presented "Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Digital Preservation Cost Questions." Their questions help institutions evaluate cost, including questions about storage fees, support, business plans, etc. to help institutions assess their approach to taking on digital preservation.
After lunch, I attended the panel on Long Term Preservation Strategies & Architecture: Views from Implementers consisting of Mary Molinaro (moderator), Katherine Skinner, Sibyl Schaefer, Dave Pcolar, and Sam Meister. Sibyl Schaefer lead off with a presentation of details on Chronopolis and ACE audit manager. Dave Pcolar followed by presenting the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) and their data replication policies for dark archives. Sam Meister discussed the BitCurator Consortium which helps with the acquisition, appraisal, arrangement and descriptions, and access of archived material. Finally, Katherine Skinner presented the MetaArchive Cooperative and their activities teaching institutions to perform their own archiving, along with other statistics (e.g., the minimum number of copies to keep stuff safe is 5).
I attended the Dimensions of Digital Preservation session, which began with Liz Lyon's presentation on "Applying Translational Principles to Data Science Curriculum Development." Her paper outlines a study to help revise the University of Pittsburgh's data science curriculum. Nora Mattern took over the presentation to discuss the expectations of the job market to identify the skills required to be a professional data scientist.
Elizabeth Yakel presented "Educational Records of Practice: Preservation and Access Concerns." Her presentation outlined the unique challenges with preserving, curating, and making available educational data. Education researchers or educators can use these resources to further their education, reuse materials, and teach the next generation of teachers.
Emily Maemura presented "A Survey of Organizational Assessment Frameworks in Digital Preservation." She presented the results of a survey focusing on frameworks for assessment models, drawing conclusions like software maturity models do for computer scientists. Further, her paper identifies trends, gaps, and models for assessment.
Matt Schultz, Katherine Skinner, and Aaron Trehub presented "Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Digital Preservation Cost Questions." Their questions help institutions evaluate cost, including questions about storage fees, support, business plans, etc. to help institutions assess their approach to taking on digital preservation.
After lunch, I attended the panel on Long Term Preservation Strategies & Architecture: Views from Implementers consisting of Mary Molinaro (moderator), Katherine Skinner, Sibyl Schaefer, Dave Pcolar, and Sam Meister. Sibyl Schaefer lead off with a presentation of details on Chronopolis and ACE audit manager. Dave Pcolar followed by presenting the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) and their data replication policies for dark archives. Sam Meister discussed the BitCurator Consortium which helps with the acquisition, appraisal, arrangement and descriptions, and access of archived material. Finally, Katherine Skinner presented the MetaArchive Cooperative and their activities teaching institutions to perform their own archiving, along with other statistics (e.g., the minimum number of copies to keep stuff safe is 5).
Day 2 concluded with the poster session (including a poster by Martin Klein) and reception.
— Justin F Brunelle (@justinfbrunelle) November 4, 2015
Pam Samuelson opened Day 3 with her keynote Mass Digitization of Cultural Heritage: Can Copyright Obstacles Be Overcome? Her keynote touched on the challenges with preserving cultural heritage introduced by copyright, along with some of the emerging techniques to overcome the challenges. She identified duration of copyright as a major contributor to the challenges of cultural preservation. She notes that most countries have exceptions for libraries and archives for preservation purposes, and explains recent U.S. evolutions in fair use through the Google Books rulings.
After Samuelson's keynote, I concluded my iPRES2015 visit and explored Chapel Hill, including a visit to the Old Well (at the top of this post) and an impromptu demo of the pit simulation. It was very scary.
Several themes emerged from iPRES2015, including an increased emphasis on web archiving and a need to improved context, provenance, and access for digitally preserved resources. I look forward to monitoring the progress in these areas.
--Justin F. Brunelle
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