Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been invited to participate in a Nation of Makers meeting at the White House on August 24 as a representative of Makerspace Urbana. The meeting brings together individuals who run, support, and/or are involved with makerspaces around the country.

Makerspaces offer community members the space, tools, and technology to turn their ideas into reality.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been invited to serve on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Coordinating Committee. The twenty-member committee, representing a diverse group of stakeholders across disciplines, encourages adoption and implementation of TOP Guidelines through education, communication, and outreach.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ted Underwood has joined the faculty, effective August 16. Professor Underwood also holds a joint appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

How are changes in computing driving interest in related fields among undergraduates? How will an influx of graduates with computer science and information science skills affect the computing workforce? Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will address questions like these in a panel discussion next week at the Workshop on the Growth of Computer Science Undergraduate Enrollments.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will speak this Saturday, August 13, at the Comics & Fandom Fest in Urbana, hosted by The Urbana Free Library (TUFL) and other local sponsors. Events will be held at the library and around town throughout the day. Tilley will give a presentation on great women in comics at 4:00 p.m. in the Lewis Auditorium at TUFL.

Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke and doctoral candidate Jeanie Austin will speak this week at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference, which will be held August 10-13 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the upcoming International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio, on August 13-19. This annual conference brings together LIS professionals and students from more than one hundred and twenty countries and provides opportunities for networking and professional development.

Doctoral students Kahyun Choi and Yun Hao and Professor J. Stephen Downie will present their paper, "WiMIR: An Informetric Study On Women Authors In ISMIR," at the 17th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference. Coauthors of the paper include Xiao Hu (PhD '10), Jin Ha Lee (PhD '08), Audrey Laplante, and Sally Jo Cunningham.

 Affiliated faculty member Clara Chu, director and Mortenson Distinguished Professor at the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at Illinois, has been selected to serve as the American Library Association (ALA) representative to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO through June 2018.

Doctoral student Jacob Jett, faculty affiliate Timothy W. Cole, Research Associate Professor David Dubin, and Professor and Dean Allen H. Renear will present, “Discerning the intellectual focus of annotations,” at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016.

The American Statistical Society is one of many organizations taking action to preserve scientific research by ensuring reproducibility. To do this, the Society will require authors who publish papers in the Applications and Case Studies section of the Journal of the American Statistical Society (JASA) to provide code and data to the journal. Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve as one of three new associate editors for reproducibility for JASA.

Family relationships play a role in the business world, but what about academia? An international team of researchers, including Assistant Professor Vetle Torvik, has discovered that family background, or kinship, can influence academic careers just as it does in other sectors of society.

Associate Professor Catherine Blake has been named a 2016-2017 Faculty Fellow at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a research and development unit of the National Library of Medicine.

Associate Professor Miles Efron will participate in the 39th International Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR). The conference will be held July 17-21 in Pisa, Italy.

A column by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack (MS ’12) appears in the July/August 2016 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery magazine, Interactions. In their column, “On the Design of the Humanities,” Mak and Pollack introduce the design of the humanities to audiences in human-computer interaction.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). An alliance of more than fifty nonprofit organizations, NCAC promotes freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression and opposes censorship in all its forms.  

Think for a moment about a meaningful event or time in your life, one of your strongest memories. Chances are you’re thinking of that memory not as a single instance in a vacuum but in the context of what led to it, the people who might have experienced it with you, or the consequences of the actions that took place. You’re probably thinking of that memory as a sequence with a beginning, middle, and end—as a story. 

Several students and faculty members will share their research at the 2016 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), held on June 19-23 in Newark, New Jersey. The event brings together international scholars focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem and Associate Professor Carol Tilley will speak at the 2016 Children’s Literature Association Conference, to be held June 9-11 at The Ohio State University. The theme of the conference is “Animation,” which reflects developments in aesthetic creation and critical analysis of children’s and young adult literature.

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will deliver a keynote address at the 2016 Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) conference, which will be held on June 8-11 in Rome. The theme of the conference is, “Designing Networks for Innovation and Improvisation.”