Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Snopes.com has no public captures on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine prior to October 2021. Snopes.com is a well-known fact checking website. It has been rated trustworthy by multiple rating organizations [1]. However, in 2021, BuzzFeed broke a story that, in fact, Snopes was plagued by plagiarized articles, and that authors were being told to plagiarize and then silently make updates to their articles after publication in the name of SEO . One of the byproducts of the BuzzFeed investigation is that there are no publicly available captures of Snopes.com in the Wayback Machine prior to 2021. Snopes’s official statement regarding this is that the founder, who was named responsible for the plagiarism, had a policy against Wayback captures; but, now that he was removed from duty, the board was going to change the policy going forwards. In fact, having no captures before 2021 means that the archives available give a more trustworthy historical view of Snopes.com than ex...

This year the ACM Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC 2026) was held from March 27–28 as an in-person event. The conference took place in Alexandria, Virginia, and the event was hosted by the Virginia Tech's Institute for Advanced Computing (IAC) . CAPWIC is all about bringing together women in computing and their peers to support each other and grow in the field. The conference connects students, faculty, and industry professionals from across the Capital Region – Pennsylvania to Virginia to share ideas, discuss research, and build a strong, supportive community. The conference featured workshops, technical talks, flash talks, research shorts, poster presentations, as well as panel,  birds-of-a-feather and keynote sessions. I was the only participant from Old Dominion University's Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group this year, where I presented a research short. The event included parallel sessions across various categories and topi...