The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2018, which will be held March 25-28 in Sheffield, UK. The annual event brings together scholars, researchers, and information professionals to share insights on critical information issues. The theme of this year's conference is "Transforming Digital Worlds."

Adjunct Assistant Professor Debra Mitts-Smith (MS '98, PhD '07), author and expert on children's and young adult literature, will serve as the distinguished speaker for the 2018 Charles W. Mann Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts on March 22 at Pennsylvania State University.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham will speak at the Coursera Partners Conference, which will be held March 6-8 at Arizona State University. The theme of this year's conference is "Learners First: Beyond the Campus Walls." Participants will discuss best practices for creating top-quality, in-demand, and affordable online learning experiences.pai

Assistant Professor Emily Knox and iSchool alumnus James LaRue (MS '81), director of the American Library Association's (ALA's) Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read Foundation, will serve as panelists for a special forum on March 5 at the University of Oregon. The event is part of the University's 2018 event series, which aims to address challenging, contemporary issues of free expression on college campuses.

David Mimno, assistant professor in the Information Science department at Cornell University, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for the 2017-2019 academic years. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. During the period of their appointments, fellows give at least one public lecture.

Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn will discuss scholarly communication at The Collective, an annual gathering of librarians, archivists, and library staff at academic libraries. The 2018 Collective, which will take place from February 28-March 1 in Knoxville, Tennessee, will center around the theme, "The Library as Test Kitchen," and feature a "test kitchen environment" where participants can "try out 'recipes' for next generation librarianship."

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.

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.

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.