School of Information Sciences

iSchool to present research at the Digital Humanities 2023 conference

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research and contribute in a number of other ways at DH2023, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), on July 10-14 in Graz, Austria. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. The theme of this year's conference is "Collaboration as Opportunity."

iSchool participation and honors include:

PhD student Wenyi Shang has been selected to receive a "Best Review Award," a new award that celebrates the tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes intellectual labor required to organize a large conference like DH2023. Shang was nominated by many of the scholars whose submissions he peer-reviewed, and his contribution was chosen from among thousands of reviews written by hundreds of reviewers.

Assistant Professor Zoe LeBlanc will present "The Programming Historian: Developing a Digital Humanities Tutorial" on July 10 at 1:30 p.m. (Central European Summer Time). She will serve as a panelist for the session, "Research Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in Digital Humanities," on July 13 at 2:00 p.m. CEST.

Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), is completing a four-year term as chair of the ADHO Executive Board at the end of DH2023. In this role, he will appear at the conference's opening and closing plenary sessions, and he will chair the ADHO Community Forum on July 12 at 12:30 p.m. CEST, as well as the session, "Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage," on July 14 at 9:00 a.m. CEST.

HTRC Digital Humanities Specialist Ryan Dubnicek and Professor Ted Underwood will present "Piloting a Machine Learning Approach to Identify English-Language Fiction in the HathiTrust Digital Library" on July 13 at 11:00 a.m. CEST.

Professor J. Stephen Downie, PhD candidate Yuerong Hu, Underwood, and Layne-Worthey will present "Cross-Cultural Classics: Preliminary Findings from Goodreads Based in the U.S. and Douban Based in China" on July 14 at 11:00 a.m. CEST.

Shang, Underwood, and Hu will present a panel on "Reception History in Many Dimensions: New Research on Book Reviews" on July 14 at 2:00 p.m. CEST.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New multi-institutional project to use AI to represent past historical periods

A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning," was recently selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. The $800,000 grant will be split among four institutions: Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of British Columbia, and McGill University. Professor Ted Underwood will serve as the principal investigator for the portion of the project at Illinois.

Ted Underwood

Wang group to present at WSDM26

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. WSDM is a premier international conference in web search, data mining, and AI, known for its highly selective acceptance rates. This year, the acceptance rate for the main track of the conference was only 16 percent. 

Dong Wang

New NSF award supports innovative role-playing game approach to strengthening research security in academia

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) award will support an innovative effort in the School of Information Sciences to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. 

Reynolds prepares for a career in global tech

Growing up on the south side of Chicago, BSIS student Devon Reynolds always saw his future in technology. He discovered the information sciences program during his senior year of high school and was drawn to its balance of challenging coursework. Choosing the iSchool at Illinois felt like a natural next step. 

Devon Reynolds

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Mariana Guerrero

Eight iSchool master's students have been named 2025–2026 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Mariana Guerrero earned a bachelor's degree in Spanish language and literature from Rockford University.

Mariana Guerrero

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top