Underwood receives NEH grant to investigate consequences of error in digital libraries

Ted Underwood
Ted Underwood, Professor

Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

"It isn't unusual for five percent of the words in volumes to be mistranscribed, with the level of error much higher in some volumes," said Underwood. "Simply measuring the fraction of mistranscribed words is easy. It’s harder to know how much difference those errors make for the methods and questions that actually interest researchers. Some forms of analysis are undisturbed by high levels of error; others may be quite sensitive, especially when errors are distributed unevenly across different historical periods and genres."

Underwood will work with graduate students from the iSchool and English Department to construct parallel collections that pair each "clean" text with a realistically error-ridden version of the same book drawn from a digital library. The team will build collections of Chinese texts as well as English texts ranging from 1700 to the present, because different character sets and printing technologies produce different kinds of error. Then the team will apply a wide range of data-mining methods to both the clean and error-ridden collections and measure the distortion produced by transcription error and other common sources of noise. The project will provide tools that help other researchers estimate the level of uncertainty in their own conclusions.

"No data is perfect. There's always some kind of error. The question is whether the error is of a kind and magnitude likely to matter for a particular question," he said.

Underwood is a professor in the iSchool and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has authored three books about literary history, including Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). His articles have appeared in PMLA, Representations, MLQ, and Cultural Analytics. Underwood earned his PhD in English from Cornell University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Tibebu joins the School

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Haileleol Tibebu joined the faculty as a teaching assistant professor on January 1, 2025. His research and teaching interests include responsible AI, AI policy and governance, algorithmic fairness, and the intersection of technology and society.

Haileleol Tibebu

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Leslie Lopez

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024–2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This “Spectrum Scholar Spotlight” series highlights the School’s scholars. MSLIS student Leslie Lopez graduated from the University of North Texas with a BA in psychology.

Leslie Lopez headshot

Nominations invited for 2024 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seeks nominations for the 2024 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2025. The award is cosponsored by Sage Publishing.

Rhinesmith joins the faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Colin Rhinesmith joined the faculty as a visiting associate professor on January 1, 2025. His position will become permanent following approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as founder and director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Colin Rhinesmith

SafeRBot to assist community, police in crime reporting

Across the nation, 911 dispatch centers are facing a worker shortage. Unfortunately, this understaffing, plus the nature of the job itself, leads to dispatchers who are often overworked and stressed. Meanwhile, when community members need to report a crime, their options are to contact 911 for an emergency or, in a non-emergency situation, call a non-emergency number or fill out an online form. A new chatbot, SafeRBot, designed and developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang, Informatics PhD student Yiren Liu, and BSIS student Tony An seeks to improve the reporting process for non-emergency situations for both community members and dispatch centers.

Yun Huang