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. 

Professor Emerita Betsy Hearne, former director of The Center for Children's Books, taught children's literature and storytelling at the iSchool for many years. She is the author of Choosing Books for Children: A Commonsense Guide, the folktale anthology Beauties and Beasts, fiction for both children and young adults, and picture books—one of which, Seven Brave Women, won the Jane Addams Children's Book Award. Hearne has reviewed books for almost forty years and has served as the children's book editor for Booklist and The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (BCCB). Her honors include a National Teaching Award from the Association of Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award from the Children’s Literature Association, and the University Scholar Award and Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of Illinois. Next month Hearne will receive an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from her alma mater, The College of Wooster.

As participation in library publishing grows, the development of a strong evidence base to inform best practices and demonstrate impact is essential. To encourage research and theoretical work about library publishing services, the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) gives an annual Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Library Publishing. The award recognizes significant and timely contributions to library publishing theory and practice. The LPC Research Committee is delighted to announce that this year's award recipient is Daniel G. Tracy (MS '12), information sciences and digital humanities librarian at the iSchool and assistant professor at the University Library, for his article, "Libraries as Content Producers: How Library Publishing Services Address the Reading Experience."

Associate Professor Kate McDowell is the 2018 recipient of the Excellence in Online & Distance Teaching Award, given annually by the University of Illinois. The award recognizes faculty members and instructors who have demonstrated sustained excellence and innovation in online and/or distance teaching and contributions to student learning through innovative uses of technology. She will receive the award at the University’s Celebration of Teaching Excellence on April 12.

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.

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.

Twenty iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2017. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

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.

iSchool Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes (MS '16) has been elected to the 2018 Executive Council for the Carpentries, the first joint steering committee for the merged organizations of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. The Carpentries is a volunteer community of instructors, more than one thousand worldwide, teaching scientists basic lab skills for research computing.