The GSLIS News Digest highlights recent news, events, and accomplishments of GSLIS faculty, staff, and students. For more news, visit the GSLIS home page and follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
News from GSLIS at Illinois
On a panel at the College Art Association in February, Professor Abdul Alkalimat provided personal history and political context in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and the 1967 Chicago Wall of Respect, the mural that kicked off a mural movement across the U.S. He also presented the 2013-14 annual Dr. Ronald Foreman lecture, “The Evolution of African American Studies in America,” which commemorated the 45th anniversary of the African American Studies program at the University of Florida. Earlier this year, Alkalimat presented the annual Martin Luther King Lecture, “Re-Thinking the Black Freedom Movement,” at Wabash College’s Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies in Indiana.
Professor Alistair Black was selected as the recipient of the Library History Essay Award for 2013. The prize is awarded annually by the Library and Information History Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) to the best essay on library history relating to, or published in, the British Isles in the previous calendar year. Black’s essay was titled, “Organizational Learning and Home-Grown Writing: The Library Staff Magazine in Britain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” and appeared in Information & Culture, 47(4).
Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn gave a talk titled, “Libraries and the Current State of Publishing,” at GSLIS in November. Her talk, sponsored by the GSLIS student chapters of the American Library Association and Association of College and Research Libraries, explored the expanding role of research libraries and librarians as publishers.
GSLIS adjunct lecturer Bobby Bothmann presented a talk titled, “An Adjunct Professor’s Perspectives on the Skills LIS Students Need, and How Practitioners and Educators Can Collaborate to Provide Them,” at the Biennial Educators Meeting at ALA Midwinter in January.
Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke served on the ALA’s Diversity Research Grants Advisory Committee in 2013. The committee selects recipients of the ALA’s Achievement in Library Diversity Research awards and Diversity Research Grant awards.
Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke’s article titled, “The Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship Program: Enhancing the LIS Professoriate,” was published in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 10(1), in early 2014. Cooke also presented her paper, “Hip-Hop Smoothed Out on a Library Tip: Exploring Literacies Through a New Pedagogical Lens,” at the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms Symposium, which was held in December at the University of Illinois.
In November, Assistant Professor Jana Diesner gave a presentation on her work on Impact Assessment at the Media Impact Funders meeting. This event, titled “Media Impact Focus: Assessing the Impact of Media,” was hosted by the Paley Center for Media in New York City.
Assistant Professor Jana Diesner presented invited talks in December at the Korea Institute of Science & Technology Information (KISTI) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), both in Daejoen, South Korea. In January, she co-organized “Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research,” a peer-reviewed preconference at the Conference of International Communication Association (ICA) in Seattle, Washington, where she also will present the paper, “ConText: Software for the Integrated Analysis of Text Data and Network Data.”
Research Associate Professor David Dubin was an invited speaker and judge for the CUDO Plays Board Game Design Competition, which took place from October 9 through February 16. This series of 11 events was presented by the Champaign-Urbana Design Organization, whose mission is to “cultivate a vibrant design culture that engages and enriches our local community.” Dubin presented a talk on the work of philosopher Bernard H. Suits (PhD, University of Illinois, 1958) at the Game Design Symposium on October 17. He was one of three judges who assessed the competing designs in seven categories. The Grand Exhibition and awards ceremony took place on February 16 at the Urbana Landmark Hotel.
Associate Professor Christine Jenkins was cited in news coverage of a censorship controversy in Brazil in November. She was quoted in an Associated Press article regarding a law allowing individuals to block unauthorized biographical works about themselves.
“Supporting Intellectual Freedom: Symbolic Capital and Practical Philosophy in Librarianship,” by Assistant Professor Emily Knox, was published in The Library Quarterly, 84(1). In this paper, Knox uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital to discuss how three areas—codification, institutionalization, and investigation—form the foundation of a practical philosophy for the support of intellectual freedom in librarianship.
An article by Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack (MS ’12) was recently published in the Fall 2013 issue of Art Documentation. The article, “The Performance and Practice of Research in A Cabinet of Curiosity: The Library's Dead Time,” discusses their exhibition held at the Figure One Gallery in Champaign, Illinois, which investigated how the materiality of information shapes the making of meaning. By showcasing the physical bodies of the codex, PDF, online and card catalogs, and librarian, the exhibition fabricated an archive of the “dead time” of research in the humanities, and made visible for analysis some of the oft-overlooked practices in the production and communication of knowledge.
Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak is serving as the 2013-2014 guest editor of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) blog. Her posts throughout the year focus on a theme of publication, both in its traditional and innovative forms. In January, Mak shared her expertise on the history of the book and the cultural production of knowledge in her invited response to a panel on “The Rhetoric of the Page in Medieval Latin Manuscripts” at the 145th annual meeting of the American Philological Association.
Associate Professor Jerome McDonough, principal investigator of the Preserving Virtual Worlds II project, was featured in a Library Journal Academic Newswire article published in November. The article, “Saving Games,” discussed the complex challenges of digital game preservation.
Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been appointed GSLIS Interim Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, overseeing aspects of recruitment, admissions, student development, and transition to employment. She recently presented a talk titled, “Young Adult Fantasy and Race: From Representation to Imagination,” at St. Louis University in January.
Professor Carole Palmer, director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), presented a webinar on “Data Curation Basics” in January as part of a data literacy webinar series hosted by the National Institutes of Health Library. Palmer’s talk provided an overview of methodology and core principles related to curating research and scientific data, including data curation profiles from several research domains.
Professor Carole Palmer gave a talk at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in February as part of the CyberGIS brown bag series. In the talk, “Optimizing Data Resources for Reuse: Site-Based Data Curation,” Palmer discussed the Site-Based Data Curation project, a collaboration among information scientists, geobiologists, data archiving experts, and resource managers at Yellowstone National Park.
Assistant Professor Carol Tilley traveled across the country during the past several months to discuss her research related to comic books. Most recently, she participated in a panel discussion titled, “Comics and the History of the Book,” in January at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Also in January, Tilley began work in her newly-elected role as director of external relations for the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE).
Sarah T. Roberts, doctoral candidate at GSLIS and assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, was interviewed by NPR's All Things Considered in November regarding new safeguards used by Internet search engines to eliminate images of child pornography online. Her work was also featured in an opinion column published by the London Free Press.
Doctoral student Cherié Weible participated in “Reaching Reference Librarians Through Genealogical Webinars,” a panel discussion at the ALA Midwinter pre-conference institute in January.
An article drawing on seven years of eChicago conferences chaired by Assistant Professor Kate Williams was recently published in the Journal of Urban Management 2(2). The article, coauthored by Williams, was titled “Becoming uCity: The Case of Chicago.”
Assistant Professor Kate Williams and Professor Abdul Alkalimat were recently awarded research support from the University of Illinois Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies to conduct a biographical study of Afro-Cuban librarian Marta Terry González.
Martin Wolske, senior research scientist at the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion, was honored by Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House at the organization’s 104th Anniversary Dinner in November. He was recognized for his efforts to bridge the digital divide in East St. Louis that have spanned more than a decade.