Underwood and students present research at CHR2020

Ted Underwood
Ted Underwood, Professor

Professor Ted Underwood, PhD students Wenyi Shang and Yuerong Hu, MS/IM students Anirudh Sharma and Shubhangi Singhal, and English PhD student Peizhen Wu will present their research at the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR2020), which will be held virtually from November 18-20. The purpose of the workshop is to "foster the formation of a community of humanities scholars that rely on a wide range of computational approaches" and to serve as a stepping stone toward the creation of a research-oriented, open-access computational humanities journal.

Underwood and the students will present their paper, "The Rise and Fall of Genre Differentiation in English-Language Fiction," in which they examine the strength of textual differentiation between genres of fiction in a collection of English-language books dating from 1860 to 2009.

"We know that new genres can emerge over time," said Underwood. "The categories we call 'mystery' and 'science fiction' weren't clearly defined in 1850, but by 1950 they described sharply distinct kinds of writing. In this paper, we ask whether the process can also go in the other direction. Can existing genres blur and melt together? We found this was true not only for specific genres, but for the genre system as a whole. The books grouped in a particular category in the twenty-first century tend to be less different from other categories than they were in the middle of the twentieth century. To check that this wasn't just an accident of library classification, we also tested the hypothesis with genre categories inferred from book reviews and found the same thing."

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. His research interests include statistical and computational modeling of humanistic evidence, machine learning and text mining, book history, digital libraries, sociology of literature, computational social science, and digital humanities. Underwood earned his PhD in English from Cornell University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Guadalupe Castillo

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 Guadalupe Castillo earned her BA in international studies and Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of California, San Diego.

Guadalupe Castillo

iSchool researchers to present at CHI 2025

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Kemboi receives the Research and Advocacy Social Justice Award

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has received the 2025 Research and Advocacy Social Justice Award from the Office of Diversity & Social Justice Education in the Office of Student Affairs. She was presented with the award at the Social Justice Awards Ceremony, which was held on April 8 in the Illini Union. The annual event honors and celebrates the work and dedication of University of Illinois community members seeking to create a more inclusive and equitable campus.

Gladys Kemboi

Undergraduate Research Symposium features iSchool students and mentors

Several iSchool undergraduate students will participate in the 18th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. During the event, visitors will learn about undergraduate research projects through oral and poster presentations, creative performances, and art exhibits. All are welcome to attend the symposium, which will be held on April 24 from 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. in the Illini Rooms and South Lounge of the Illini Union. Oral presentations will be held on the second floor of the Illini Union.