Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics has selected PhD student Jessica Cheng as a LEADS-4-NDP 2018-2019 Fellow. LEADS-4-NDP, the LIS Education and Data Science for the National Digital Platform program, is part of the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.

Doctoral candidate Paige Cunningham successfully defended her dissertation, "Exploring Communication Patterns in Massive Open Online Courses," on May 6.

With support from the National Humanities Center, Professor Ted Underwood is examining patterns of human perspective throughout two centuries of literary history. The Center is a residential institute for advanced study in art history, classics, languages and literature, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. In addition to pursuing their own research and writing at the Center, fellows form seminars and study groups with cohorts holding shared research interests.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve on the Reproducibility Badging and Definitions Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is a U.S. nonprofit association that develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to facilitate the creation, management, and interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and teaching.

Four Illinois professors are creating the Innovation Illinois Community Laboratory + Interactive Exhibit with $150,000 in funding from the University of Illinois System, as part of an investment in the arts and humanities. This project will involve a yearlong course that welcomes undergraduate students from all disciplines, who will spend the year imagining, researching, and prototyping social innovation projects that will become part of a traveling exhibit.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has been named the 2019 recipient of the Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award, which is given annually by the Children's Literature Association (ChLA). The award recognizes an outstanding article of literary criticism by an early career scholar on the topic of children's literature within a given year.

Doctoral candidate E.E. Lawrence will present at the 2019 Popular Culture Association National Conference, which will be held April 17-20 in Washington, D.C. Lawrence will give the talk, "Should the Public Library Promote Popular Fiction?," during the Libraries, Archives & Museum area's "Collections" session.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel has received support from the University of Illinois and Drexel University to attend summer programs in the areas of critical theory and data science.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn will present her research at a preconference workshop during the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) biennial conference, which will be held April 10-13 in Cleveland, Ohio. With its theme of "Recasting the Narrative," ACRL 2019 will focus on what it means to be an academic library professional in the twenty-first century.

Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh and her collaborators from the University of Oklahoma and Norman Public Schools will present their research at the 2019 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, which will be held on April 5-9 in Toronto, Canada. The theme of this year's meeting is "Leveraging Education Research in a Post-Truth Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence."

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox and John T. F. Burgess, assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama, have co-edited a new book. Foundations of Information Ethics, recently published by ALA Neal-Schuman, covers principles and concepts in information ethics as well as the history of ethics in the information professions. 

John A. Walsh, associate professor of information and library science at Indiana University and director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for the 2018-2020 academic years. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. During the period of their appointments, fellows give at least one public lecture.

Doctoral candidate E.E. Lawrence successfully defended their dissertation, "Reading for Democratic Citizenship: A New Model for Readers' Advisory," on March 28.

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2019, which will be held March 31-April 1 in Washington, D.C. 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 "Inform. Include. Inspire."

PhD student Linh Hoang presented her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider at the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium on Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering, which was held March 25-27 at Stanford University. 

MS/LIS student Vera Vasileva has been awarded an Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Student Scholarship to participate in the ACRL 2019 conference, which will be held April 10-13 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the conference, Vasileva will attend the presentation of "We Don't Need that Anymore, Exploring the Myths and Realities of the Impact of Digitization on Print Usage," a paper she coauthored with her graduate assistantship supervisor Thomas Teper, associate professor and associate dean of libraries for the University Library.

Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the UP Carnegie Conference, which will be held from March 24-30 in Pretoria, South Africa.

This month doctoral candidate Jim Jones presented his digital preservation work at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies 60th Annual Conference (SCMS 2019) and participated in the PBCore Workshop for Public Media Users and Educators.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for Digital Scholarship Symposium 2019, which will be held on March 19 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The theme of this year's symposium is "(Re-)Mining Text: From Traditional to Digital." Co-organized by the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre and CUHK Library, the event aims to explore techniques and applications of text mining in the era of digital scholarship.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn will discuss Publishing Without Walls (PWW) at the National Federation of Advanced Information Science (NFAIS) 2019 Humanities Roundtable, which will be held on March 10 in Washington, D.C. The topic of this year's program is "Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Its Impact." It will address the skills, tools, and resources required for digital humanities evaluation as well as how publishers, libraries, and content aggregators can better support digital humanities.