Yuerong Hu

Yuerong Hu

Doctoral Student

PhD, Information Sciences, Illinois (in progress)

MS, Information Management, Illinois

BA, Library Science, Wuhan University

BS, Economics, Wuhan University

Research focus

My research centers on critical cultural data analytics, which combines theories from digital humanities, cultural analytics, critical data studies, and sociotechnical systems to study cultural data provisions. Specifically, I investigate digitized publications in print curated by digital libraries and user-generated book reviews online.

Honors and Awards

  • Lee Dirks Award for Best Full Research Paper, iConference, 2023
  • Summer Research Institute Stipend, The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems (CSST), 2023
  • SIGIR Student Travel Grant, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, 2022
  • Best Student Poster of the School of Information Sciences Research Showcase, School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, 2019
  • Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Programme (OIDLPP) Scholarship, School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, 2018

Publications & Papers

View more publications and presentations on Yuerong Hu's Google Scholar page.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Hu, Y., LeBlanc, Z., Diesner, J., Underwood, T., Layne-Worthey, G., & Downie, J. S. (2023). Complexities of leveraging user-generated book reviews for scholarly research: transiency, power dynamics, and cultural dependency. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-023-00376-z.

Hu, Y., Ocepek, M. G., Downie, J. S., & Barker, L. (2022). Listen to Librarians: Highlighted Core Competencies for Librarianship from the Perspectives of Working Librarians. College & Research Libraries, 83(6), 994-1013. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.994

Zhou, L., Hu, Y., & Xu, J. (2018). Understanding the lack of student engagement in Chinese library science undergraduate education. Information Development, 34(2), 148-161. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266666916683538

Peer-Reviewed Conference Research Papers 
Hu, Y., Layne-Worthey, G., Martaus, A., Downie, J.S., & Diesner, J. (2023). Research with User-Generated Book Review Data: Legal and Ethical Pitfalls and Contextualized Mitigations. Proceedings of iConference 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28035-1_13

Parulian, N.N., Dubnicek, R.C., Evans, D., Hu, Y., Worthey, G., Downie, J. S., Heaton, R., Lu, K., Orr, R., Magni, I., & Walsh, J. (in press). Tuning out the Noise: Benchmarking Entity Extraction for Digitized Native American Literature. Proceedings of 86th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information, Science & Technology (ASIS&T 2023). 

Hu, Y., LeBlanc, Z., Diesner, J., Underwood, T., Worthey, G., & Downie, J. S. (2022). Complexities Associated with User-generated Book Reviews in Digital Libraries: Temporal, Cultural, and Political Case Studies. Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3529372.3530930

Jiang, M., Hu, Y., Worthey, G., Dubnicek, R., Underwood, T. & Downie, J. S. (2021). Impact of OCR Quality on BERT Embeddings in the Domain Classification of Book Excerpts. Proceedings of The Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR) 2021. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2989/long_paper43.pdf

Hu, Y., Jiang, M., Underwood, T., & Downie, J. S. (2020). Improving Digital Libraries Provision of Digital Humanities Datasets: A Case Study of the HTRC Literature Dataset. Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2020. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383583.3398621

Sharma, A.*, Hu, Y*., Wu, P*., Shang, W*., Singhal, S*., & Underwood, T* (2020). The Rise and Fall of Genre Differentiation in English-Language Fiction. Proceedings of The Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR) 2020. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2723/long27.pdf.  

Research Datasets 
Jett, J., Capitanu, B., Kudeki, D., Cole, T., Hu, Y., Organisciak, P., Underwood, T., Koehl, E., Dubnicek, R., Downie, J.S. (2020). The HathiTrust Research Center Extracted Features Dataset (2.0). HathiTrust Research Center. https://doi.org/10.13012/R2TE-C227

* denotes equal authorship

Presentations

Peer-Reviewed Conference Paper and Poster Presentations
Layne-Worthey, G., Hu, Y., & Downie, J. S. (2023, July 10-14). Cross-Cultural Classics: Preliminary Findings from Goodreads Based in the U.S. and Douban Based in China. Digital Humanities 2023, Hybrid (Graz, Austria and Online).

Hu, Y. (2023, Mar 13-17). Research with User-Generated Book Review Data: Legal and Ethical Pitfalls and Contextualized Mitigations. iConference 2023, Online.

Jiang, M., & Hu, Y. (2021, November 17-19). Impact of OCR quality on BERT Embeddings in the Domain Classification of Book Excerpts. The Workshop on Computational Humanities Research 2021 (CHR), Online.

Hu, Y. (2020, August 1-5). Improving Digital Libraries Provision of Digital Humanities Datasets: A Case Study of the HTRC Literature Dataset. ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2020, Online.

Hu, Y. (2020, March 23-26). The Real Library World is Dirty and You Don't Learn That at All in Schools. iConference 2020, Hybrid (BorĂ¥s, Sweden and Online).

Hu, Y. (2019, March 31-April 4). Bridging the Information Gap between Structural and Note-Level Musical Datasets. iConference 2019, Washington, DC, United States.

Hu, Y. (2017, March 22-25). Understanding the Lack of Student Engagement in Chinese Library Science Undergraduate Education. iConference 2017, Wuhan, China.

Peer-Reviewed Doctoral Colloquium Presentations
Hu, Y. (2022, October 29-November 1). Complexities Associated with User-Generated Book Reviews: Transiency, Cultural Dependency, and User Power Dynamics. ASIS&T 2022 Doctoral Consortium, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.

Hu, Y. (2022, June 20-24). Synthesizing Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities Perspectives for Illuminating Underinvestigated Complexities Associated with User-Generated Book Reviews. JCDL2022  Doctoral Consortium, Online.

Hu, Y. (2022, February 20-March 4). Underinvestigated Complexities Associated with User-Generated Book Reviews. iConference 2022 Doctoral Consortium, Online.