Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie was the keynote speaker for The Future of the Scholarly Book conference, which was held July 31 at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The event, sponsored by Springer Nature and organized by the ANU Library, was designed to address challenges, issues, and trends in the modern scholarly monograph, particularly in social sciences and humanities.

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will be a panelist at the Hampton University Forum on Minority Recruitment & Retention in the Library & Information Science Field, which will be held August 1-2 in Hampton, Virginia. The mission of the forum, which is supported by an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, is to identify critical issues in the recruitment and retention of minority librarians and serve as a springboard for ideas to effectively address these concerns. 

The first Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society, "Mind the Gaps! The Futures of the Field," will be held August 9-11 at the iSchool at Illinois. This inaugural conference, cosponsored by the iSchool and The Center for Children's Books, seeks to bring together scholars, artists, and other members of the international comics studies community for critical conversations about the future of the field, in all its multidisciplinary and transcultural formations.

Assistant Professor Peter Darch will discuss problems with reproducibility in research at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) 2018 Conference, which will be held July 25-28 at Lancaster University in the UK. EASST brings together a variety of disciplines, with many members having qualifications in both natural science/engineering and social sciences. The theme of this year's conference is "Meetings – Making Science, Technology, and Society Together."

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present her research on storytelling at two upcoming conferences, the Midwest Association of Colleges and Employers (ACE) Annual Conference, which will be held July 23-25 in Rosemont, Illinois, and the National Storytelling Summit, which will be held July 25-28 in Kansas City, Missouri.

Assistant Professor Matthew Turk will present the Whole Tale research project at the 17th annual Scientific Computing with Python conference (SciPy 2018), which will be held July 9-15 in Austin, Texas. The conference brings together participants from industry, academia, and government for tutorials, talks, and developer sprints.

Professor and Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Director Bertram Ludäscher will be the keynote speaker for the 7th International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW) during ProvenanceWeek 2018, which will be held July 9-13 at King's College in London.

Doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra will present his research at the 29th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, which will be held July 9-12 in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference will focus on the role of links, linking, hypertext, and hyperlink theory on the web and beyond.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will discuss her medical informatics research at the 9th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, which will be held July 3-6 at the University of Amsterdam. The conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are working in the field of argumentation theory. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which will take place from July 2-6 at the University of Oxford. The annual summer school offers training in the digital humanities through hands-on workshops and lectures.