MS/IM student Suyash Singh received Honorable Mention in the Data Visualization Competition sponsored by the University of Illinois Library’s Scholarly Commons. The competition provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in visually communicating information. Winners were announced on October 9 at the Fall 2018 Scholarly Commons Open House.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has been appointed as a 2018-19 R.C. Evans Data Analytics Fellow in the University of Illinois-Deloitte Foundation Center for Business Analytics. Launched in 2016, the Center is part of the Gies College of Business at the Urbana campus.

Doctoral candidate Jimi Jones will discuss his dissertation research at the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Digital Preservation 2018, which will be held October 17-18 in Las Vegas. NDSA is a consortium of more than 220 organizations committed to the long-term preservation and stewardship of digital information and cultural heritage, for the benefit of present and future generations.

Three iSchool students were on the winning team at PygHack 2018, a 24-hour hackathon that brings together coders, designers, engineers, and dreamers to work together to create something that can benefit the community or an organization in Champaign-Urbana. This year's event was held on September 29-30 at the University of Illinois Research Park. PygHack projects were judged on community benefit, collaboration, design, functioning prototype, and innovation. 

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has extended non-consumptive research tools to copyrighted materials, expanding research through fair use. HTRC is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to the HathiTrust Digital Library database.

Doctoral candidate Kahyun Choi successfully defended her dissertation, "Computational Lyricology: Quantitative Approaches to Understanding Song Lyrics and Their Interpretations."

Associate Professor and MSLIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will discuss her research on fake news, misinformation, and disinformation at the 2018 Public Interest Technology Summit, which will be held on October 13 at Harvard University. The summit is hosted by digital HKS, an independent project at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs that is committed to teaching public leaders to understand how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, digital equity and inclusion, governance of government platforms, and accountability.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn will present her research at the 15th annual Open Education Conference (OpenEd18), which will be held October 10-12 in Niagara Falls, New York.

MS/LIS student Edward Gloor discusses his practicum experience at the Champaign County Historical Archives.

Doctoral candidate Kirstin Phelps will participate in ISIC 2018: The Information Behaviour Conference, which will be held October 9-11 in Krakow, Poland. The conference is a platform for a broad and multidisciplinary community of researchers to present and discuss how people engage with information in a myriad of contexts.