Jana Diesner, assistant professor, has received a start-up allocation award from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). This award provides Diesner and her co-PI Brent Fegley, a doctoral student in the Informatics program, with time on XSEDE’s high-performance computing resources and help from XSEDE staff members with parallelizing their code.

Carol Tilley, GSLIS assistant professor, is an invited speaker for the Colloquia Series at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. Tilley’s presentation, “Children, Comics, Critics, and the Researcher,” is scheduled for January 30. In the mid-twentieth century, comic books were extremely popular but also a highly contested form of…

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner has received a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to develop, evaluate, and apply a computational solution for measuring the impact of social justice documentaries. For the grant, “Impact Assessment of Social Justice Documentaries,” Diesner is supported by JustFilms, a division of the Ford Foundation that supports documentary filmmakers, particularly…

Nicole Cooke, GSLIS assistant professor, will receive the 2013 Norman Horrocks Leadership Award given by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). Cooke is being honored for her leadership in a variety of professional ALISE activities including her service on multiple committees including the Doctoral Student special interests group, the Diversity Task Force, and…

Safiya Noble (MS ’09, PhD ’12), GSLIS alumna and assistant professor of African-American Studies at Illinois, has been named an affiliated faculty member of GSLIS. Noble’s research interests include the socio-cultural, economic, and ethical implications of information with a specific focus on the intersection of race, gender, and technology. Noble found her way to academia after a twelve…

GSLIS Assistant Professor Kate McDowell has been invited to serve on a committee convened by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that  is seeking nominations for a new nonfiction Summertime Reading List for children and young adults. “I see this list as a significant step in acknowledging the importance of nonfiction for children, as well as the readers who have always…

Tim Offenstein (MS ’11), GSLIS alumnus and adjunct instructor, was recently honored with a Larine Y. Cowan "Make a Difference" Award, which is given annually by the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access (OEOA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the award for Excellence in Access and Accommodations, which recognizes either individuals or campus units whose efforts…

Professor Alistair Black has received an award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Research Board for his project "Buildings of Hope: The Design of Public Libraries in Britain in the Long 1960s." The project examines what modernist library design meant to librarians, architects, local politicians and planners, and the public. The research will contribute to recent revisions of the…

Research Associate Professor Jon Gant, director of the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), has been invited to participate in an invitation-only broadband research conference on December 7 in Washington, DC. The event, sponsored by NC Broadband, a division of the North Carolina Department of Commerce, will "design a research agenda for how the country can best measure the economic impact…

Faculty and staff from GSLIS authored three out of the four articles published in the most recent issue of Information & Culture: A Journal of History (University of Texas Press, vol. 47, no. 4). The interdisciplinary journal, which broadly examines the history of information in cultural environments such as professional, academic, and societal settings, featured articles written by Professor…