A project to support interdisciplinary game studies at the University of Illinois has received funding through the University's Investment for Growth initiative. Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education will support research and teaching at the dynamic intersection of play, immersive technologies, and interactive design. Participating units include the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, College of Media, and College of Fine and Applied Arts.

Collecting and understanding data is important, but equally important is the ability to tell meaningful stories based on data. Students in the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST) learn data visualization as well as storytelling techniques, a combination that will prove valuable to their employers as they enter the workforce.

iSchool researchers will present their work at the Workshop on Research Objects 2019 (ro2019), which will be held in conjunction with eScience 2019 on September 24-27 in San Diego, California. The Research Objects approach proposes a way to "package, describe, publish, archive, explore, and understand digital research outputs by reusing existing Web standards and formats." Workshop participants will explore recent advances and challenges remaining to increase Research Object uptake among data providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

This summer MS/LIS student Nicole Miller returned home to San Antonio, Texas, to complete a practicum with the public library system that first sparked her interest in library and information science. When Miller was a teenager, she logged over 450 hours of community service with the teen program at the San Antonio Public Library. After completing her BA in literary studies from The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, she volunteered again at the library while finishing applications for master’s degree programs.

Join iSchool faculty and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from September 24-26 in Knoxville, Tennessee. The theme of ALISE 2019 is "Exploring Learning in a Global Information Context." Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos will provide welcoming remarks at the iSchool-sponsored School Representative's Breakfast at 7:30 a.m. on September 25.

Six iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2019. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. pau

Professor Ted Underwood will present his research on machine learning at the University of Pittsburgh on September 19. His talk is part of the University's Sawyer Seminar, a year-long project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that brings together a diverse range of practitioners and disciplinary specialists to analyze the co-evolution of data and method across more than a century.

Associate Professor Anita Say Chan presented her research at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S 2019), which took place in New Orleans on September 4-7. The Society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine (a field often referred to as STS). The theme of this year's meeting was "Innovations, Interruptions, and Regenerations."

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider presented her research on argumentation mining at a doctoral workshop at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland on September 2-3. Her lecture and tutorials were featured during the University’s Language and Cognition program’s “Linguistic and Corpus Perspectives on Argumentative Discourse” workshop. Schneider discussed problem definitions, corpora, and argument annotation for mining arguments from text. 

Celia C. Pérez (CAS '12) credits her experience as a student in the Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) program with her decision to become a children's book author. Her debut children’s book, The First Rule of Punk, published by Viking Books for Young Readers in 2017, was a hit. In addition to receiving several honors, including the 2018 Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis is currently adapting the book into a musical.