Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has published a paper, "Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books," in The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). According to Knox, over the past few years, there have been an increasing number of diverse books on the Most Challenged Books List from the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom. Her latest work expands on a previous discourse analysis of censorship on challenges to diverse books through more robust analysis of the challenge cases.

Doctoral candidate Aiko Takazawa successfully defended her dissertation, "'Tutteli to Japan': a Case Study of Spontaneous Collaboration in Disaster Response," on May 17.

Conservation organizations and foundations have invested billions to preserve natural resources and biodiversity across the globe, but the effectiveness of these investments over time is not always clear. A new multi-institutional project, led by a University of Illinois researcher and supported by a $550,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will trace key outcomes of $655 million in the foundation's global conservation investments made over 40 years.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a committee report examining computational reproducibility and replicability in science, with the goals of improving research rigor and transparency. The congressionally mandated report was authored by an ad hoc committee of national experts, including iSchool Associate Professor Victoria Stodden.

Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics has selected PhD student Jessica Cheng as a LEADS-4-NDP 2018-2019 Fellow. LEADS-4-NDP, the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform program, is part of the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

With support from the National Humanities Center, Professor Ted Underwood is examining patterns of human perspective throughout two centuries of literary history. The Center is a residential institute for advanced study in art history, classics, languages and literature, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. In addition to pursuing their own research and writing at the Center, fellows form seminars and study groups with cohorts holding shared research interests.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve on the Reproducibility Badging and Definitions Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is a U.S. nonprofit association that develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to facilitate the creation, management, and interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and teaching.

Four Illinois professors are creating the Innovation Illinois Community Laboratory + Interactive Exhibit with $150,000 in funding from the University of Illinois System, as part of an investment in the arts and humanities. This project will involve a yearlong course that welcomes undergraduate students from all disciplines, who will spend the year imagining, researching, and prototyping social innovation projects that will become part of a traveling exhibit.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has been named the 2019 recipient of the Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award, which is given annually by the Children's Literature Association (ChLA). The award recognizes an outstanding article of literary criticism by an early career scholar on the topic of children's literature within a given year.