Martin Klein

Shawn M. Jones, Michele C. Weigle, Martin Klein et al.

To allow previewing a web page, social media platforms have developed social cards: visualizations consisting of vital information about the underlying resource. At a minimum, social cards often include features such as the web resource's title, text summary, striking image, and domain name. News and scholarly articles on the web are frequently subject to social card creation when being shared on social media. However, we noticed that not all web resources offer sufficient metadata elements to enable appealing social cards. For example, the COVID-19 emergency has made it clear that scholarly articles, in particular, are at an aesthetic disadvantage in social media platforms when compared to their often more flashy disinformation rivals. Also, social cards are often not generated correctly for archived web resources, including pages that lack or predate standards for specifying striking images. With these observations, we are motivated to quantify the levels of inclusion of required metadata in web resources, its evolution over time for archived resources, and create and evaluate an algorithm to automatically select a striking image for social cards. We find that more than 40% of archived news articles sampled from the NEWSROOM dataset and 22% of scholarly articles sampled from the PubMed Central dataset fail to supply striking images. We demonstrate that we can automatically predict the striking image with a Precision@1 of 0.83 for news articles from NEWSROOM and 0.78 for scholarly articles from the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Shawn M. Jones, Alexander C. Nwala, Martin Klein et al.

Tools such as Google News and Flipboard exist to convey daily news, but what about the past? In this paper, we describe how to combine several existing tools with web archive holdings to perform news analysis and visualization of the "biggest story" for a given date. StoryGraph clusters news articles together to identify a common news story. Hypercane leverages ArchiveNow to store URLs produced by StoryGraph in web archives. Hypercane analyzes these URLs to identify the most common terms, entities, and highest quality images for social media storytelling. Raintale then uses the output of these tools to produce a visualization of the news story for a given day. We name this process SHARI (StoryGraph Hypercane ArchiveNow Raintale Integration).

Shawn M. Jones, Martin Klein, Michele C. Weigle et al.

For traditional library collections, archivists can select a representative sample from a collection and display it in a featured physical or digital library space. Web archive collections may consist of thousands of archived pages, or mementos. How should an archivist display this sample to drive visitors to their collection? Search engines and social media platforms often represent web pages as cards consisting of text snippets, titles, and images. Web storytelling is a popular method for grouping these cards in order to summarize a topic. Unfortunately, social media platforms are not archive-aware and fail to consistently create a good experience for mementos. They also allow no UI alterations for their cards. Thus, we created MementoEmbed to generate cards for individual mementos and Raintale for creating entire stories that archivists can export to a variety of formats.

Sawood Alam, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson et al.

We describe challenges related to web archiving, replaying archived web resources, and verifying their authenticity. We show that Web Packaging has significant potential to help address these challenges and identify areas in which changes are needed in order to fully realize that potential.

Martin Klein, Lyudmila Balakireva, Harihar Shankar

Services and applications based on the Memento Aggregator can suffer from slow response times due to the federated search across web archives performed by the Memento infrastructure. In an effort to decrease the response times, we established a cache system and experimented with machine learning models to predict archival holdings. We reported on the experimental results in previous work and can now, after these optimizations have been in production for two years, evaluate their efficiency, based on long-term log data. During our investigation we find that the cache is very effective with a 70-80% cache hit rate for human-driven services. The machine learning prediction operates at an acceptable average recall level of 0.727 but our results also show that a more frequent retraining of the models is needed to further improve prediction accuracy.