Downie to give keynote at digital scholarship symposium

Stephen Downie
J. Stephen Downie, Professor, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for Digital Scholarship Symposium 2019, which will be held on March 19 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The theme of this year's symposium is "(Re-)Mining Text: From Traditional to Digital." Co-organized by the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre and CUHK Library, the event aims to explore techniques and applications of text mining in the era of digital scholarship.

Downie is codirector of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to text found in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

In his keynote presentation, "HathiTrust Research Center: Creating New Opportunities in Support of Scholarly Text Mining," he will discuss how technological, content, legal, social, and human factors shape HTRC’s services. The talk will highlight some of HTRC’s text mining and analysis tools, including the Data Capsule virtual computing environment and the Bookworm trends analysis tool, as well as HTRC's Advance Collaborative Support and other outreach programs. He will also introduce the Extracted Feature datasets that provide users with the freedom of "open data" while still respecting HTRC’s non-consumptive imperatives.

On March 20, Downie will give the talk, "Library and Information Science Education in the Age of Big Data," to the Hong Kong Library Association. He will reflect upon his experiences as an educator, researcher, and administrator at Illinois; discuss efforts to create educational programs designed to equip students with the skills necessary to succeed in a big data environment; and share his insights as well as suggestions for future strategies and goals.

Downie holds a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition, along with master's and doctoral degrees in library and information science, all from the University of Western Ontario.

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