Sharon Irish, project coordinator for the iSchool's Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), has received a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her upcoming book highlighting artist Stephen Willats. According to Irish, Willats' ideas about the need for repeated contact with each other to discover different perspectives are fundamental to education and information sharing.

iSchool faculty and alumni played an active role in the Playful by Design Spring Symposium, which took place April 5-7 on the Urbana campus. The symposium, organized by the Playful by Design Research Cluster, included presentations and panel discussions as well as a new exhibit at the Spurlock Museum, movie screening, keynote address, and games and gaming make-a-thon. The event was sponsored by the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning, Spurlock Museum, CU Community FabLab, and Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner is the program co-chair of the 3rd International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2018). The workshop will be held on April 17 in Orlando, in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI 2018).

A group of cross-disciplinary experts gathered in Chicago on April 5 and 6 for a national forum on text data mining research. The forum, Data Mining Research Using In-copyright and Limited-access Text Datasets, was coordinated by iSchool faculty and staff and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (grant LG-73-17-0070-17). 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Research Panel and Luncheon at the University of South Carolina. The event, which is hosted by the University's College of Information and Communications, will be held on April 13.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox will give a presentation on trigger warnings on April 9 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her talk, "Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context," will provide an overview of the multiple histories of trigger warnings as well as context for understanding how and why trigger warnings are used.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present her research on reproducibility at the University of Delaware Department of Computer & Information Sciences Distinguished Speaker Lecture on April 6. The theme for the lecture series is "rising stars in a scientific world of convergence."

According to Stodden, the rate of production, collection, and analysis of data, and the speed at which computational infrastructure is changing (e.g., technologies for cloud computing, network capabilities, and high performance computing systems) implies a need for extreme agility in computationally enabled research. 

Doctoral candidate E.E. Lawrence will present their research at the 2018 Popular Culture Association National Conference, which will be held March 28-31 in Indianapolis. Lawrence will give the talk, "Promoting Romance Reading and Improving Taste," during the Libraries, Archives & Museum area's "Embracing Scorned Literature" session.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider, CAS student Janina Sarol (MSIM '17), and undergraduate Linxi Liu will discuss their research at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018) in Grenoble, France. Sarol will present their paper, "Testing a Citation and Text-Based Framework for Retrieving Publications for Literature Reviews," at the conference’s Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop on March 26.

Leah Davis, senior research associate with the Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), will speak at the Information and Communications Technology in Organizations and Society Conference (ICTO2018) on March 23 in Paris. Davis and Alice Robbin (Indiana University) will present their paper, "The Problematic of Governance under Conditions of Catastrophic Disaster: Theoretical Frames for Understanding the Response to the Hurricane Season in the United States, 2005-2017," which has been selected as a finalist for best conference paper.