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

Smith authors paper for newly relaunched ARIST

A paper by Professor Emerita Linda C. Smith, "Reviews and Reviewing: Approaches to Research Synthesis," is one of seven papers included in the relaunch of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), a collection of peer-reviewed, comprehensive, and systematic reviews on topics relevant to information science.

Linda C. Smith

Hu defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yuerong Hu successfully defended her dissertation, "Complexities and Nuances of Online Book Reviews in Scholarly Research," on March 6.

Yuerong Hu

Knox named to IJIDI editorial board

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been invited to join the editorial board of The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). The quarterly, open-access online journal is sponsored by East Carolina University and the University of Toronto and hosted on the servers of the University of Toronto Library.

Emily Knox

iSchool undergraduate launches new initiative to promote women in data science

A new student organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will promote diversity and inclusion in data science and empower women in the STEM field. Samridhi Verma, BSIS+DS student and an ambassador for Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide, launched the new initiative because of her interest in fostering a community where students and professionals can connect, share insights, and grow together. WiDS Urbana-Champaign welcomes individuals of all genders who support the cause, including students, professionals, and academics from a variety of backgrounds and expertise levels in data science and related fields.

Samridhi Verma