Seven GSLIS doctoral students received support this fall to participate in the iSchool Doctoral Student Exchange Program, an initiative led by the iSchools Consortium and funded by the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The program was developed as a way to facilitate relationships within the iSchools community, provide opportunities to present research, and expose doctoral candidates to other research environments.
Doctoral students submitted applications in the spring and summer for trips to be taken during the Fall 2012 semester. As part of their visits, students gave public presentations at their host sites in order to prompt research interaction with other library and information science programs.
Jeanie Austin presented “Who Has a Say?: Power Structures and Their Effect on Juvenile Detention Center Librarianship,” at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles on October 29. Her talk discussed the role of juvenile detention center librarianship in social and political disparities, specifically those that affect youth of color and LGBT youth. During her visit, she also gave an informal presentation in a youth literature course taught by her host and Adjunct Professor Loretta Gaffney (MS ’98, CAS ’00, PhD ’12).
Kalev Leetaru visited the University of California, Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the end of November. There he interacted with scholars regarding the use of network analysis to understand the flow of information around the world. His host was Assistant Adjunct Professor Cory Knobel.
Karla Lucht visited the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on November 4 through November 7. She presented a guest lecture in a Contemporary Literature and Other Materials for Children course, taught by Judith Saltman, professor and chair of the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program. Her lecture, “The Search for Hapas: Identifying Titles Featuring Mixed-race Asian Protagonists in Youth Literature,” addressed limits of online and print resources when trying to access the depth of cultural patterns in titles featuring North American protagonists with a mixed-race Asian identity.
K.R. Roberto presented “Description is a Drag (and Vice Versa): Classification of LGBTQ Identities” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies on October 17. His talk, which was sponsored by the Information Organization Research Group, explored classification theory, specifically the ways in which authorized vocabularies have historically differed from languages used by community members and LGBTQ scholars. He was hosted by Professor Hope Olson and Visiting Professor Richard Smiraglia.
Ingbert Schmidt visited the School of Information Studies at Syracuse on November 12 and 13 and was hosted by Professor and Associate Dean for Research Steve Sawyer. His talk, “Re-Inventing the Wheel: The Re-Creation of Documents in a Bumble-Bee Organization,” explored the motivations behind the reuse and re-creation of documents, using information from an ongoing study of knowledge communication practices.
Miriam Sweeney traveled to the University of Washington’s iSchool from November 13 through November 16. She presented her talk, “Reading Race, Gender, and Labor in Anthropomorphized Agents,” to the interdisciplinary Design:Use:Build (DUB) group for interdisciplinary human-computer interaction scholars. Sweeney discussed her current research on Microsoft’s former “Ms. Dewey” search interface, examining the racializing, gendering, and anthropomorphization of information artifacts. Her host was Professor Batya Friedman.
Aiko Takazawa will be visiting the University of California, Irvine. Plans for her visit are currently being arranged with her host, Professor Gary Olson.
GSLIS is a proud member of the iSchools consortium, which includes thirty-six institutions in eleven countries dedicated to advancing the information field in the twenty-first century.