Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present the closing keynote of the Measures of Success Educator Impact Series at Western Michigan University (WMU) on March 21. The virtual series, which is sponsored by the WMUx Office of Faculty Development, focuses on equity and educator impact.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the iSchool launched its Postdoctoral Research Associate Program. The goal of this program is to prepare candidates for tenure-track assistant professor or other appointments inside and outside of academia. The cohort has grown to five postdocs, and applications are currently being accepted for the 2023-2024 academic year.

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2023, which will be held virtually from March 13-17 and physically from March 27-29 in Barcelona, Spain.

Adjunct Professor Sidney Berger (MSLIS '87) has authored a new book that will provide readers with a definitive glossary of book-related terminology. In The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians, and Others (2nd Edition), which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, he brings “the vocabulary and theory of bookselling and collecting into the modern commercial and academic world” through the addition of more than 700 new entries. 

As the Pathways Intern with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Division of Preservation and Access, Daniel Evans published two Jupyter notebooks for researching U.S. print culture. The notebooks, located on the Library of Congress's GitHub repository, will provide researchers with a downloadable data set of newspaper title essays and starter code so that they can create queries specific to their own research needs and interests.

PhD student Yingying Han is helping youth learn about Chinese American history and take action to preserve their cultural heritage. Through a multi-session workshop, which will take place the next four Saturdays from 10:00-11:30 a.m. at the University YMCA in Champaign, Han hopes to teach children about the contributions of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans to the history of the United States.

Documenting the Future: Navigating Provenance Metadata Standards, a new book authored by PhD student Michael Gryk and alumni Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) and Jessica Yi-Yun Cheng (PhD '22), explores provenance, which is the study and documentation of how something has come to be. Provenance documentation is critical for authenticity, trustworthiness, and reproducibility in science. 

A project to examine the circulation of newspaper reports about anti-Black violence in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. newspapers could provide context to the spread of white supremacist ideologies in social media today. 

A paper coauthored by PhD student Zhixuan (Kyrie) Zhou and Mengyi Wei, a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, received the Best Paper Award at the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-56). The conference, which was held in Maui on January 3-6, is one of the longest-standing working scientific conferences in information technology management.