Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. 

Doctoral candidate Yingying Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S.,” on May 28.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Kahyun Choi joined the faculty as an assistant professor on August 16, 2024. She most recently served as an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie and Professor Ted Underwood will present their research at the Digital Humanities International Symposium on March 13 and 15 in Japan.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research and contribute in a number of other ways at DH2023, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), on July 10-14 in Graz, Austria. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. The theme of this year's conference is "Collaboration as Opportunity."

A paper coauthored by PhD student Yuerong Hu, HTRC Associate Director for Research Support Services Glen Layne-Worthey, Alaine Martaus (PhD '19), Professor J. Stephen Downie, and Associate Professor Jana Diesner, "Research with User-Generated Book Review Data: Legal and Ethical Pitfalls and Contextualized Mitigations," has received the Lee Dirks Award for Best Paper at iConference 2023.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

A project to examine the circulation of newspaper reports about anti-Black violence in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. newspapers could provide context to the spread of white supremacist ideologies in social media today. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at Digital Humanities 2022, the annual conference of the International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The theme of this year's conference, which was held online on July 25-29, was "Responding to Asian Diversity."

iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), cohosted by the iSchool at Illinois and the Luddy School of Informatics at Indiana University, has received a $325,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of 15 awarded nationwide, this grant will support the development of a new set of visualizations, analytical tools, and infrastructure to enable users to interact more directly with the rich data extracted from the HathiTrust Digital Library’s collection of more than 17.5 million digitized volumes.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell will deliver the keynote address at the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Association Mid-Term Conference, which will be held virtually from Germany on October 14-15. The goal of the MWW is "to provide future-oriented impulses for collaboration in the field of humanities and cultural studies research." The association's mid-term conference will focus on engagement with material and medial losses in the archive and library.

The iSchool at Illinois will host the 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will be held virtually from September 27-30. JCDL is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will feature paper and poster presentations as well as a wide variety of tutorials and workshops offering hands-on experiences with different digital libraries and online archives.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider's project, "Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis," will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.

Glen Worthey, associate director for research support services at the HathiTrust Research Center, is among the first recipients of new grant funding to advance digital scholarship in cultural institutions, through a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Worthey is the project director of "AEOLIAN (Artificial intelligence for cultural organizations)," a collaboration with Loughborough University in the U.K. The project will bring together a team of experts to develop and examine new approaches–particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning–for improving access to and use of digital collections that are currently restricted due to privacy concerns or copyright protection. 

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has received a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a project that will develop new methods for creating and analyzing digital collections, with an emphasis on content related to historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. Principal investigators are based at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the University of Kansas.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2020), which was held virtually August 1-5. The event brought together international scholars focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues. 

Professor Ted Underwood has received a $73,122 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the consequences of error in digital libraries. While digital libraries represent an immense storehouse of knowledge, the texts are full of errors because of the imperfect process by which they are transcribed optically.

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.

David King (MS '78, PhD '94) believes libraries must be reinvented to meet the needs of professional practitioners. This "out of the box" mindset has led him to design and build digital libraries for professionals providing services to victims of crime and abuse.