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.

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."

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. 

The 2014 Ebola virus epidemic that originated in West Africa and spread to other parts of the globe was the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. During this period, a frightened public turned to social media and internet search engines for information and to share news of the outbreak. According to a team of international researchers, including iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks, understanding the social media activity around a health crisis, like the 2014 Ebola outbreak, can help health organizations improve their communication strategies and prevent misinformation and panic.

Martin Wolske, interim director of the iSchool's Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), is organizing a workshop on digital equity for Net Inclusion 2018, which will be held on April 17-19 in Cleveland, Ohio. He is working in collaboration with Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and former CDI senior research associate.

Connect with iSchool faculty and staff next month at the 2018 ALISE Annual Conference and the ALA 2018 Midwinter Meeting in Denver. ALISE 2018 will be held February 6-9, and ALA Midwinter will be held February 9-13. A reception to honor the Kansas City Public Library, recipient of the 2017 Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, will take place on Saturday, February 10, from 5:30-7:00 p.m. in Ellingwood Rooms A and B at the Crowne Plaza Downtown Denver. The award is sponsored by the iSchool and Libraries Unlimited.

The Humanities Without Walls Consortium, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, fosters interdisciplinary, collaborative research, teaching, and scholarship in the humanities, sponsoring new areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. On December 14, the Consortium announced the results of its latest research challenge initiative, "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate." It awarded one of these grants—a multi-year investment of $138,360—to a team of humanists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The award will support their multi-year research project, titled "The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record." 

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider (MS ’08) has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a series of automated informatics tools for reviewing medical literature more quickly and easily. The project, “Text Mining Pipeline to Accelerate Systematic Reviews in Evidence-Based Medicine,” was funded through a subaward from the University of Illinois at Chicago that will cover $228,006 in direct costs.