iSchool presents research at JCDL 2022

iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

In the paper presentation, "Complexities Associated with User-generated Book Reviews in Digital Libraries: Temporal, Cultural, and Political Case Studies," PhD student Yuerong Hu, Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc, Associate Professor Jana Diesner, Professor Ted Underwood, Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Glen Worthey, associate director for research support services at the HathiTrust Research Center, discussed their study investigating user-generated book reviews through the lens of temporal changes of user-generated book lists, cross-cultural differences in user-generated book ratings, and user power dynamics reflected in the review texts. 

"In the last two decades, user-generated book reviews have opened up new opportunities for computational and empirical studies on readership, reception, and books," said Hu. "As iSchool professionals, we want to leverage these newly affordable research resources to empirically map the dynamics between books and readers online. We also want to make a timely contribution to this burgeoning area by filling two existing gaps: a lack of non-Anglophone perspectives and a dearth of attention to the real-world complexities associated with such web data provisions."

In the presentation, "A Prototype Gutenberg-HathiTrust Sentence-level Parallel Corpus for OCR Error Analysis: Pilot Investigations," Ming Jiang, PhD student in informatics; Ryan Dubnicek, digital humanities specialist; Worthey; Underwood; and Downie discussed the use of a prototype sentence-level parallel corpus to fill in the gaps resulting from optical character recognition (OCR) errors.

According to Jiang, "This research provides a novel dataset that can assist scholars who are exploring the impact of OCR noise on fine-grained semantic understanding tasks, such as next sentence prediction, chapter segmentation, and word-level semantic encoding. The ultimate goal of this research is to advance the understanding of the capability of NLP (natural language processing) tools to process OCR'd texts, hoping to facilitate downstream computational research on digitized library collections with trustworthy NLP support."

In addition to these presentations, Hu participated in the JCDL Doctoral Consortium and Downie was featured in the “Meet the Experts” session.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Internship Spotlight: AbbVie

BSIS student Miranda Ma discusses her internship at the AbbVie Innovation Center. Ma advises job seekers to keep an open mind and not limit their job search to a specific industry, especially for a field like user experience.

Miranda Ma

Tilley shares comics research at European universities

Associate Professor Carol Tilley shared her expertise in comics research at several invited talks in Europe this month. Tilley served as the keynote speaker for the international conference, “Comics, the Children and Childishness,” at Ghent University in Belgium. In her keynote, “Re-Centering Children in Comics,” she encouraged researchers studying comics and children to give more focus to the lived experiences of young people, moving away from an over-reliance on studying specific texts or their uses. 

Carol Tilley

Knox testifies before U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on book bans

Associate Professor Emily Knox testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on September 12. She was one of five witnesses offering testimony for the hearing "Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature." 

Emily Knox

McDowell examines benefits and obstacles of library data storytelling

The effective use of data storytelling could positively impact public library managers' approaches to data collection and their advocacy for libraries, according to Associate Professor Kate McDowell. However, cultural roadblocks to data storytelling must be addressed for the process to be successful, McDowell discovered in a recently completed study.

Kate McDowell