Introduction to Web Science

The spring semester is at full throttle, and I figured it was time to write my first blog post of 2011. I'm teaching Introduction to Web Science this semester (I mentioned this back in November). It's an upper-level elective for CS majors that approaches Web Science from a computing perspective. There have been a few other undergraduate Web Science courses offered at other universities, but they are quite rare.

There is no single book on the topic of Web Science, so I'm using a combination of texts (see the class web page) that focus on web search engines, networks, and collective intelligence.

If you'd like to follow along with the class, I'm placing our PowerPoint presentations online on the class web page.

New Web Science course offered in Spring 2011

I'll be offering an Introduction to Web Science course this Spring. Web Science is an emerging field of study which encompasses computer science, law, economics, and a number of other disciplines. This course is for upper-level CS majors and will therefore focus mainly on computing aspects of Web Science. Below is a description of the course. If you are a Harding CS major looking for a challenging and enlightening elective, I hope you'll consider taking it.

The Web has fundamentally changed how we learn, play, communicate, and work. Its influence has become so monumental that it has given birth to a new science: Web Science, or the science of decentralized information structures. Although Web Science is interdisciplinary by nature, this course will be focusing mainly on the computing aspects of the Web: how it works, how it is used, and how it can be analyzed. We will examine a number of topics including: web architecture, web characterization and analysis, web archiving, Web 2.0, social networks, collaborative intelligence, search engines, web mining, information diffusion on the web, cloud computing, and the Semantic Web.

Programming projects will use Python, HTML & JavaScript, some Google APIs, and the Facebook API.

Prerequisites: COMP 245 & 250

Students needed to work the WAC

I just received word that my grant proposal with the NSF has been funded. The project is called the "Web Archive Cooperative" or WAC. It's a 3 year grant with Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford University), Andreas Paepcke (Stanford University), Michael L. Nelson (Old Dominion University), and myself.

In short, the WAC is our attempt to provide services, tools, and data access to web scientists. We are researching methods to provide access to web data like query logs, tag annotations, blogs, profiles and Twitter messages that are often located in disparate archives. We are working on finding this data, building software tools for combining and analyzing the data, and methods to preserve the data for the long term.

What this means is that I will be looking for some highly talented/motivated CS students (currently enrolled at Harding) to work with me over the next 3 years during the summers. You will get to work closely with me and in conjunction with others at Stanford and ODU, and you will receive a stipend. If you think this is something you'd like to get involved with, please let me know.