Briefs

Sept. 28, 2005, By Daniel Aloi, Cornell News Service

ITHACA, N.Y. -- A team of Cornell University researchers has been awarded a $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop advanced Web tools for social sciences research.

Ultimately intended to assist in the detailed statistical and observational study of social and information networks, the project will involve a team of computer scientists and social scientists developing the means -- dubbed "cybertools" -- to extract and analyze information from vast collections of data.

The project's primary source of data will be the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org, which is supported by the NSF and the Library of Congress, among others. One of the first steps in the project, which is funded through 2007, will be to transfer 30 percent, or 200 terabytes, of the massive archive to a computer server at Cornell for use by researchers.

Developed by Brewster Kahle in 1996 and based at the Presidio in San Francisco, the archive comprises more than 40 billion Web pages. "This archive is the only copy that has been saved of how the Web has developed over the years," Cornell computer scientist William Arms said. It includes text, audio, moving images and software, as well as archived Web pages.

The Cornell project title is "Very Large Semi-Structured Datasets for Social Science Research", and the researchers include Michael W. Macy, sociology department chair and the project's principal investigator, sociologist David Strang and computer scientists Dan Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg, who was recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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