Naiman receives NASA grant to digitize astrophysical literature

Jill Neiman
Jill Naiman, Teaching Assistant Professor

Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman has received a $506,912 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to digitize predigital scientific literature. Her project, "The Reading Time Machine: Transforming Astrophysical Literature into Actionable Data," is a collaboration with Harvard University and the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a digital library portal operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. With over 15 million records, ADS is one of the most important archives in the scientific field of astronomy.

"Newer documents are ‘born digital,’ making them machine-readable and parseable," said Naiman. "This has not only helped domain scientists find relevant research more efficiently, but through methods like natural language processing, it also has facilitated new discoveries in these fields."

Naiman's project aims to extend these capabilities to predigital documents by extracting their text, figures, and tables, allowing researchers to apply the same information mining methods that are available to "born digital" documents. This will result in more easily searchable documents and new discoveries. The work will also enhance the screen-reading capabilities of these documents to make them more accessible.

For the project, researchers will use optical character recognition and object detection methods to find and "extract" any tables and figure captions in the text. According to Naiman, this is something that has been done in biomedical literature but not in astronomy. After the images are extracted, they will be classified (i.e., graph, photo, picture of sky), and the figure labels will be parsed to extract science-relevant information.

"In each step, we plan on publishing a database—to be hosted by ADS—and the code so that other folks can do the same to their ‘old’ scientific literature," she said. "The wealth of science generated by such 'indexing' efforts in other STEM fields has demonstrated that we have only scratched the surface of the discoveries possible when the community has access to science-ready data collected from the literature." 

Naiman earned her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed National Science Foundation and Institute of Theory and Computation postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before coming to the University of Illinois. She is a Fiddler Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Garnes receives Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement

Carolyn L. Garnes (MSLIS '72) has received the 2025 Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association (ALA). The annual award, named in honor of award-winning children's book author Virginia Hamilton, is presented in odd years "to a practitioner for substantial contributions through active engagement with youth using award-winning African American literature for children and/or young adults, via implementation of reading and reading-related activities/programs."

Carolyn L. Garnes

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.

Wang wins grand prize at Research Live!

Informatics PhD student Olivia Wang won the Grand Prize at the 2025 Research Live! competition, which was held on April 8 in the Campus Instructional Facility Atrium. At the event, which is hosted by the Graduate College, thirteen finalists presented their graduate research in three minutes or less to a general audience. Wang received $500 as the Grand Prize winner.

Olivia Wang

iSchool at Illinois ranked number one

The iSchool at Illinois has retained its top spot in U.S. News & World Report's 2025 ranking of graduate schools offering a master's degree in library and information studies. The iSchool has held the number one ranking for nearly three decades.

iSchool Building