Seo awarded IMLS grant for accessible data curation project

JooYoung Seo
JooYoung Seo, Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $649,921 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-254891-OLS-23), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

The three-year grant is an extension of Seo's ongoing project, "MAIDR: Multimodal Access and Interactive Data Representation," that has received support from the International Society of the Learning Sciences and the Wallace Foundation. Through the initial work, Seo has been developing computer tools that augment visual charts with touchable (braille), readable (text), and audible (sound) representations, to make them more accessible for the visually impaired. In the new project, Seo's tools will connect the multimodal and accessible data representation with data curators' day-to-day reproducible workflows, integrating them into reproducible frameworks (e.g., Jupyter Notebook, R Markdown, Quarto) and visualization libraries (e.g., R ggplot2, Python matplotlib).

"Multimodal data representation is not merely an innovation; it is an imperative for inclusivity," Seo said. "While data visualization is a dominant method in scientific representation, it inherently marginalizes those who are blind and visually impaired, essentially sidelining them from full participation in the scientific discourse. My multimodal data representation challenges this norm by expanding the toolkit beyond the visual. It incorporates auditory, tactile, and verbal methods, thereby democratizing access to knowledge."

According to Seo, this approach enriches the understanding of data for everyone and offers multiple perspectives that a singular approach could easily miss.

The new project will involve meeting with data curators to assess needs and with blind patrons to shape the tools being created. For that work, Seo will collaborate with his community partners, Data Curation Network (DCN) and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

Partners on the project include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Posit Public Benefit Corporation (FKA, RStudio), and the Chart2Music (C2M) open-source project team.

"By the end of this endeavor, I aspire to deliver a robust, user-friendly, and accessible solution that serves data creators, visually impaired patrons, and people of all abilities who can benefit from multimodal and reproducible data representation. Together, we can democratize data and make it accessible and meaningful for everyone," said Seo.

Seo is an RStudio double-certified data science instructor, active open-source contributor and accessibility expert who is certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). His research focuses on how to make computational literacy more accessible to people with disabilities using multimodal data representation. He earned his PhD from the Learning, Design, and Technology Program at Pennsylvania State University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Wang to deliver keynote at GenAIRecP 2025

Associate Professor Dong Wang will present the keynote at the second workshop on generative AI for recommender systems and personalization on August 4, in Toronto, Canada. The event will be held in conjunction with KDD 2025. 

Dong Wang

McDowell authors new book on data storytelling for libraries

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has authored a new book that will equip readers with the skills to transform data into stories for library advocacy, social justice, and inclusivity. Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact, the second book in a new ALA Editions series on Critical Cultural Information Studies, will be available next month.

Kate McDowell

iSchool faculty selected as Public Voices Fellows

Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Teaching Assistant Professor Haileleol Tibebu, and Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2025–2026 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship. The program is part of a national initiative led by The OpEd Project to help experts from underrepresented groups to be positioned as public thought leaders in their fields and contribute to the national dialogue around important issues.

Huang named a 2025–2026 Linowes Fellow

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2025–2026 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. She is also the recipient of a 2024–2025 fellowship, which "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

Yun Huang

New book explores video standards in film and archives

A new book co-authored by iSchool Adjunct Lecturer Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, examines video file standards and the tensions that have emerged between the film industry and the archiving community that is tasked with preserving cultural cinematic productions. 

Jimi Jones