School of Information Sciences

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

iSchool researchers to present at ASSETS 2025

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 27th International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) ACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025), which will be held in Denver, Colorado, October 26–29, 2025. This conference allows researchers to present their scholarship on design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults.

Chan to give an invited talk on "Predatory Data"

Professor Anita Say Chan will give an invited lecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB) on October 23. The talk, part of the "Confronted with America" series hosted by the Center for American Studies and Research, will be moderated by Jihad Touma, founding director of AUB's School of Computing and Data Sciences.

Anita Say Chan

Olalere receives HSLI Jira Scholarship

Precious Olalere, a doctoral student in information sciences, has been awarded the 2025 Helen Knoll Jira Scholarship from the Health Science Librarians of Illinois (HSLI). This award supports individuals pursuing education in library or information science in Illinois, especially those focusing on health science librarianship.

Precious Olalere

Student Spotlight: Daria Meshcheriakova

BSIS student Daria Meshcheriakova came to the iSchool with intention. Originally from Russia, where she lived for 17 years, Meshcheriakova moved to Chicago and attended Harold Washington Community College before transferring to the University of Illinois. Among potential universities, Illinois proved to be the best fit.

Daria Meshcheriakova

iSchool researchers present at ILA 2025

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top