Professor Ted Underwood will give a lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands as the Visiting Scaliger Professor for 2019. The position is affiliated with both the Scaliger Institute of Leiden University Libraries and the Faculty of Humanities. In his talk on November 21, "The Role of the Humanities in an Information Age," Underwood will discuss how "humanists are joining hands with data science to create a form of public reflection that fuses the scale of machine learning with the historical self-consciousness of humanistic tradition."

This past summer MS/LIS students Kaylen Dwyer and Jasmine Wong participated in the Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Program, an ongoing collaboration between Illinois and Oxford. The 2019 program partnered with the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) as part of the grant "Digging Deeper, Reaching Further: Libraries Empowering Users to Mine the HathiTrust Digital Library Resources." The students proposed their own independent projects and were advised by faculty members at Oxford e-Research Center, David de Roure and Kevin Page, and iSchool partners Professor J. Stephen Downie and Visiting Research Services Specialist Ryan Dubnicek.

Postdoctoral Research Associate Rhiannon Bettivia (PhD '16) is the co-author of a chapter in Politics of Scale: New Directions in Critical Heritage Studies, a newly published book edited by Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Suzie Thomas, and Yujie Zhu. In the chapter, "The Dynamics of Scale in Digital Heritage Cultures," Bettivia and Elizabeth Stainforth, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, examine scalar politics as enacted through Europeana, the EU digital platform for cultural heritage, and the Digital Public Library of America.

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 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.

Professor Ted Underwood has authored a new book about recent discoveries in literary history and the changes that made those discoveries possible. His book, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change, will be published by The University of Chicago Press Books in March and is available for pre-order.

Doctoral candidate Jacob Jett presented his research in digital cultural heritage collections at the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities annual conference (JADH 2018), which was held September 9-11, in Tokyo, Japan. The theme of this year's conference was "Leveraging Open Data."

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie was the keynote speaker for The Future of the Scholarly Book conference, which was held July 31 at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The event, sponsored by Springer Nature and organized by the ANU Library, was designed to address challenges, issues, and trends in the modern scholarly monograph, particularly in social sciences and humanities.

Over thirty Chinese academic librarians have a better understanding of American libraries after participating in a visit to the Urbana campus. The visit was hosted by Lian Ruan (MS '90, PhD '11), head librarian and director of international programs at the Illinois Fire Service Institute

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, which will take place from July 2-6 at the University of Oxford. The annual summer school offers training in the digital humanities through hands-on workshops and lectures.