Thanks to research conducted by Associate Professor Carol Tilley, the work of one of the most influential anti-comics voices has been debunked. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s evidence of the negative effects of comic readership on young people hasn’t been taken seriously by scholars in decades, but a new discovery by Tilley shows that even when Wertham’s claims were taken as fact by many—in the 1940s and 1950s—a small but vocal group was already questioning his methods.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke is one of three winners of the 2016 Kenneth and Sylvia Marantz Fellowship for Picturebook Research, which encourages scholars from the United States and abroad to make use of resources available at the Marantz Picturebook Collection for the Study of Picturebook Art in their research.

Every month, Google alone fields billions of search requests. The staggering demand for information, coupled with the exponentially growing amount of information available, means that reliable search results are key to maneuvering a flooded information landscape. Associate Professor Miles Efron is among the leading scholars investigating ways to improve search. With funded research projects…

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will travel to the United Arab Emirates in March to take part in a workshop at New York University’s Abu Dhabi Institute. “Charisma of the Book: Global Perspectives for the 21st Century,” will be held March 12-14.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox will participate in a panel discussion on “Libraries and Public Access to Books” at the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday, March 12. Knox and fellow experts will explore the topic of information access and the ways libraries have shaped conversations surrounding issues of access.

GSLIS Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been named a 2015 Instructor of the Year by the Web-based Information Science Education (WISE) Consortium. Knox was nominated by students for her excellent instruction in the Fall 2015 course, Intellectual Freedom and Censorship (LIS590FRL).

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will speak at two upcoming conferences on the topic of collection and use of digital social trace data. Her talks will address current issues in this research field, including privacy, ethics and regulations, and methodological issues related to data accuracy as well as considering the content of text data for advancing social network theory.

Several members of the GSLIS community participated in the 2016 Computational Social Science Workshop at Illinois. Hosted by the University Library Scholarly Commons and The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), the workshop was held at the I Hotel and Conference Center on January 30. Presentations and hands-on sessions by speakers representing an array of…

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke will be the featured speaker at the inaugural event of the newly-formed Midwest Chapter of REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking. The event, which is open to the public, will be held on February 5 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in room 1-470 of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Richard J. Daley Library.  

Associate Professor Miles Efron has been named the GSLIS Centennial Scholar for 2015-2016. The Centennial Scholar award is endowed by alumni and friends of GSLIS and given in recognition of outstanding accomplishments and/or professional promise in the field of library and information science. “This is a real honor. One of the things that makes GSLIS a great academic home is the excellence and…