Diesner and students organize tutorials for The Web Conference

Jana Diesner
Jana Diesner, Affiliate Associate Professor

Associate Professor Jana Diesner and her students have organized two tutorials for The Web Conference 2021. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 12-23, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

The first tutorial, "Information Extraction from Social Media: Tasks, Data, and Open-Source," was organized by doctoral candidate Rezvaneh (Shadi) Rezapour, Shubhanshu Mishra (PhD '19), and Diesner. In this hands-on tutorial, participants will learn about digital social trace data abstraction, which allows researchers to model social media data with rich information associated with social media text, such as authors, topics, and time stamps. Participants will be introduced to several Python-based, open-source tools for performing information extraction on social media data and become familiar with a catalogue of publicly available social media corpora for extraction tasks.

The second tutorial, "Hands-on Tutorial on Analyzing Social Network Data in Jupyter Python: The Essentials, Signed Networks, and Network Optimization," was organized by Rezapour, Diesner, doctoral candidate Ly Dinh, and Samin Aref (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research). According to the organizers, while several open-source tools for social network analysis are available, there is a need for a pipeline that guides scholars through a multilevel analysis of networks. This tutorial will educate participants on how to use network libraries in Jupyter for analyzing the structure of social networks.

Diesner leads the Social Computing Lab at the iSchool. Her research in human-centered data science and responsible computing combines the benefits of machine learning, AI, network analysis and natural language processing with the consideration of social science theories, social contexts, and ethical concerns. 

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Dalia Ortiz Pon

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 Dalia Ortiz Pon earned her bachelor's degree in Latina/Latino studies from San Francisco State University. 

Dalia Ortiz Pon

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day

He receives Amazon Research Award to improve monitoring of Earth’s ecosystem

A new project led by Professor Jingrui He aims to help scientists monitor disruptions to the Earth’s ecosystem, such as climate change. She recently received support for her work through an Amazon Research Award, which includes $60,000 in cash and an additional $40,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.

Jingrui He

iSchool undergraduates selected as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) has selected BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur and BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars. Representing nineteen majors and nine minors in eight colleges and schools at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and two additional universities, the eighteen scholars in this cohort encompass diverse fields of study, from community health to graphic design to statistics. 

BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig and BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur

Guan successfully defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yingjun Guan successfully defended his dissertation, "Disambiguating Academic Institution Names: A Comprehensive Study of Authority Files, Linguistic Variations, and Computational Evaluation in PubMed Affiliations," on April 28. 

Yingjun Guan