Associate Professor Emily Knox will deliver the Masha Dexter Lecture on Gender, Sexuality, and Public Policy at Brown University on April 7. The purpose of the annual lecture is to "memorialize and promote in other students Masha Dexter's extraordinary energy and engagement with the overlapping issues of gender, sexuality, and public policy, as reflected in the broad range of her own activities."

The Community Data Clinic has announced its first cohort of Community Media, Data, and Technology (CMDT) Fellows. The new program is part of the "Reparative Data and Media Initiative: Extending Racial and Research Justice in Champaign County" project, which is funded through the University's Call to Action initiative and led by Anita Say Chan, associate professor and director of the Community Data Clinic, and Katie Shumway, director of the Community Learning Lab in the School of Social Work. The fellowships provide annual funding and technical support to community organizations in Champaign County "looking to advance promising ideas to change local communities and systems."

While traditional closed captions represent the spoken part of a video, important content may not be expressed, to the detriment of audiences who depend on captions to understand the material being presented. With the increasing reliance on videos in online learning, this becomes even more problematic. A new collaborative project being led by Assistant Professor Yun Huang will focus on explanatory captions, which give insight into a video's visual and audio content as well as the spoken word. Her project, "Advancing STEM Online Learning by Augmenting Accessibility with Explanatory Captions and AI," has received a three-year $526,006 grant (totaling $849,994 with two collaborators at Gallaudet University and University at Notre Dame) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as an Emerging Scholar by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), which is dedicated to the empirical investigation of learning in real-world settings and the use of technology-facilitated learning. Funded by the Wallace Foundation, the Emerging Scholars Program elevates and supports the work of scholars from marginalized and underrepresented groups whose research focuses on "addressing educational injustices through the research methodologies and/or topics under study." 

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences, iSchool at Illinois, is pleased to announce that SAGE Publishing will serve as cosponsor of the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award.

A new book on information policy includes chapters by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Emily Knox. Research Handbook on Information Policy, edited by Alistair S. Duff, was recently published by Edward Elgar Publishing. The handbook covers topics such as the history and future of information policy, freedom of information and expression, intellectual property, and information inequality.

In July 2020, Chancellor Robert J. Jones announced the creation of the Call to Action Research Program to Address Racism and Social Injustice, a $2 million annual commitment by the University of Illinois to respond to the critical need for universities across the nation to prioritize research focused on systemic racial inequities and injustices that exist not only in communities but in higher education itself. On November 2, Chancellor Jones announced that 22 projects have been funded through this new program. Associate Professor Anita Say Chan will serve as a lead on two projects.

People who are blind take pictures and videos and share them with others but face a unique challenge—they cannot independently review their pictures and videos to identify unnecessary private or sensitive content. A set of new algorithmic and interactive techniques being developed by researchers at the iSchool and partner institutions will empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos. Principal investigators on the project include Associate Professor Yang Wang; Danna Gurari, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Leah Findlater, associate professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. The collaborative project, "Novel Algorithms and Tools for Empowering People Who Are Blind to Safeguard Private Visual Content," received a four-year, $1,199,993 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the U of I team led by Wang receiving $315,931.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Sarah Park Dahlen (MS/LIS '09, PhD '09) will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2021, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. A nationally recognized scholar in children's literature, Dahlen is currently an associate professor of library and information science at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel will give the opening keynote address at the Critical Pedagogy Symposium, which will be held virtually on May 17-19. The symposium is a collaborative project of the Association of College and Research Libraries/Greater New York Metropolitan Area Chapter, Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee (LILAC) of The City University of New York, and METRO.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that JooYoung Seo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. He is a PhD candidate in the Learning, Design, and Technology program at Pennsylvania State University and also an RStudio double-certified data science instructor and accessibility expert certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

The iSchool's Library Resources for Spanish Speakers (IS 563) course was featured in a session at Seguimos Creando Enlaces (Creating Connections), a virtual conference held on March 25. Adjunct Lecturers Pamela Espinosa de los Monteros and Anne Barnhart teach the course, in which students explore differences in U.S. Spanish-speaking populations and examine information resources for meeting their needs. At the session, moderated by Barnhart and Espinosa de los Monteros, MS students Kristin Greer Love, Lea Weatherall, and Sylvia Figueroa-Ortiz as well as recent graduates Eddie Kristan (MS '20) and Aldo Vasquez (MS '18) shared their experiences taking the course.

PhD student Jamillah R. Gabriel will present her research at the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference (ACRL 2021), which will be held virtually from April 13-16. The theme of this year's conference is "Ascending into an Open Future."

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, will present her research at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), to be held virtually on October 17-21. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

PhD student Courtney Richardson has been selected as a Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) fellow by Imagining America (IA), a consortium that "brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory 'America' and world." Fellows are selected for their creative and intentional commitment to public engagement and unique approach to engaged scholarship.

Two projects led by iSchool faculty members have been selected as Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Research Clusters for 2020-2021. Formerly known as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, HRI fosters interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts, and social sciences at the University of Illinois. HRI Research Clusters enable faculty and graduate students to “develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work.” Projects selected as clusters receive grants of $2,500 to support their activities.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Madelyn Sanfilippo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral IT policy researcher at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant to spend three weeks at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. During her visit, which will take place in May 2020, Chan will lecture on feminist data methods and give a workshop on community data.

The University Library's Diversity Committee and the iSchool's Diversity Committee are recipients of a Strategic Programs Initiative Funds grant to support programs on "Becoming a Trans Inclusive Library."

Moises Orozco Villicaña, director of enrollment management at the iSchool, was featured in the fall 2019 issue of Perspectives, the magazine of NAGAP, which is the Association for Graduate Enrollment Management. In the interview, "A Candid Conversation on Increasing Enrollment of Underrepresented Students in Graduate School," Orozco Villicaña described his personal motivations for pursuing higher education, his experiences working with underrepresented students, and some of the challenges associated with the recruitment and retention of students of color. He also presented on this topic at the 2019 NAGAP Annual Conference earlier this year.