iSchool coordinates IMLS-funded forum on data mining research

IMLS Data Forum

A group of cross-disciplinary experts gathered in Chicago on April 5 and 6 for a national forum on text data mining research. The forum, Data Mining Research Using In-copyright and Limited-access Text Datasets, was coordinated by iSchool faculty and staff and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (grant LG-73-17-0070-17). 

Principal Investigator Bertram Ludäscher, professor and director of the iSchool’s Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), led the effort with co-principal investigators Megan Senseney, CIRSS research scientist; Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, university librarian at the University of Waterloo; and investigator Eleanor Dickson, visiting digital humanities specialist for the HathiTrust Research Center.

"Our goal in convening a forum around text data mining with use-limited data is to situate academic libraries within a much broader landscape, articulate points of convergence and divergence among key stakeholder groups, and set forth a strategy for libraries to expand their research data services to include support frameworks for text data mining," explained Senseney.
 
"Our recommendations, forthcoming as an ACRL white paper, will focus not only on gaining access to these data but also on strategies for documenting and disseminating workflows and hosting and preserving research outputs," she said.

The local advisory committee included the following iSchool faculty: Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie, Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, Associate Professor Victoria Stodden, and Professor Ted Underwood. Other members included Daniel Tracy (MS '12), information science/digital humanities librarian and assistant professor at the University Library; Melissa Cragin (PhD '09), adjunct assistant professor and executive director of the NCSA Midwest Big Data Hub; Scott Althaus, affiliated faculty member and Merriam Professor in Political Science, professor of communication, and director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research; and master's student Sara Benson, copyright librarian and assistant professor at the University Library.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."

Carboni joins the iSchool faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nicola Carboni has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in digital humanities at the University of Geneva.

Nicola Carboni

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Chan to present "Predatory Data" work at named lectures

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will present research drawn from her new book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, at two named lectures this month. The lectures, which celebrate Women's History Month, will be held at the University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon University.

Anita Say Chan