Chieh-Li "Julian" Chin, visiting research scientist at the iSchool's Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), is a co-organizer of the Smart Gigabit Communities Reverse Pitch competition at this weekend's HackIllinois.

Strategic collaboration among the University of Illinois, the City of Champaign, a student-driven hackathon and two National Science Foundation programs—the US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities Program and the Midwest Big Data Hub Program—kicks off this weekend.

The University has been awarded a $20,000 grant from US Ignite to host the Smart Gigabit Communities Reverse Pitch Challenge in our community. The community will provide matching contributions in cash and/or in-kind, totaling $40,000 in available resources for the Reverse Pitch event to support the development of smart gigabit applications.

Master's student Natalie Leoni is the winner of this year's Graduate Student Exhibit Contest and the C. Barbara Mueller Award for Excellence in Exhibition Design, sponsored by the University of Illinois Library. Her exhibit, "Mapping Fiction," showcases holdings from the University Library's collections, displaying literary maps from books such as Winnie-the-Pooh and The Hobbit. The exhibit highlights how maps like these were created and disseminated.

Marianne Martens (MS '06) will deliver the 2018 Gryphon Lecture on Friday, March 2, at the iSchool. Sponsored annually by The Center for Children's Books (CCB), the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture. It is free and open to the campus and public.

The images of doctors found in comics can be comforting, such as the authoritative and compassionate "Rex Morgan, M.D.," or bizarre, as in the case of Marvel Comics character Dr. Strange, a neurosurgeon turned sorcerer.

Their depiction in comics has progressed from slapstick portrayals in the early 20th century to comics that present more realistic representations of them and of the ethical questions they face. Associate Professor Carol Tilley wrote about the representations of doctors and medical practice in comic strips, comic books and graphic novels in the February issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics. The issue was devoted to the topic of graphic medicine.

The Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI) at the iSchool will close as a separate entity effective July 1, 2018, subject to the approval of the Senate of the Urbana-Champaign campus. Its programs and initiatives will continue in the form of a distributed research model.

iSchool alumna Soraya Silverman-Montano (MS '11) is the 2018 president of the Nevada Library Association (NLA). In this role, one of her goals is to work with library organizations across the state to get their staff involved and active in the organization. Silverman-Montano, head of Youth Services at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District’s Spring Valley branch, was named the NLA's…

Over 140 people attended the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) UnCamp, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley Libraries, on January 25 and 26. In addition to keynotes focused on methodologies of text and data mining, researchers from the fields of information science, digital libraries, literary history, digital pedagogy, and the history of social movements presented their work and its intersection with the HathiTrust Digital Library. Slides and notes from the presentations are available on the Uncamp website.

While the issue of gender equality is more prevalent in modern times than in the Victorian era, a new study shows that in literature, the number of women characters and women authors has declined rather than grown over the years. Professor Ted Underwood led the research, which used machine learning to analyze the presentation of gender in more than 100,000 novels from 1703 to 2009 in the HathiTrust Digital Library. 

The 2014 Ebola virus epidemic that originated in West Africa and spread to other parts of the globe was the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. During this period, a frightened public turned to social media and internet search engines for information and to share news of the outbreak. According to a team of international researchers, including iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks, understanding the social media activity around a health crisis, like the 2014 Ebola outbreak, can help health organizations improve their communication strategies and prevent misinformation and panic.

Master's student Paige Dhyne likes to connect people with information. It was one of the reasons that Dhyne, who hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan, decided to study LIS after earning a dual bachelor's degree in film/video production and writing from Grand Valley State University. While initially attracted to the iSchool because of its number-one ranking, she became convinced that Illinois was the perfect fit for her after getting to know the iSchool staff, faculty, and students at a visit day last spring.