Projects

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From Voluntary to State Action: Laissez-faire Philosophy and the Early Public Library Movement in Britain

Time frame
2015-2017
Investigator
Alistair Black

The public library system in Britain today is reeling under the impact of neo-liberalist attitudes to the role of the state in society. This contrasts starkly with attitudes to public libraries when they were first proposed and established in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, economic liberals argued in favour of state involvement in the provision of libraries to…

From Voluntary to State Action project

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Cartel Smuggling Study

Time frame
2019-2020
Investigator
Jingrui He
Total funding to date
$78,917.00
Funding agency
Arizona State University and the Department of Homeland Security

This joint effort with Arizona State University’s CAOE team aims to create a suite of effective and efficient AI tools for analyzing cartel smuggling activities, building upon the team’s expertise in machine learning, data mining, and visual analytics.

U.S. Coast Guard

HathiTrust + Bookworm Project

Time frame
2014-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$504,373.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is partnering with the Cultural Observatory team that developed the Google Books Ngram Viewer together with Google. The goal of this collaboration is to implement a greatly enhanced open-source version of the Cultural Observatory’s open-source “Bookworm” text analysis and visualization tool designed to assist scholars to meet the challenges posed by the…

HathiTrust + Bookworm project

HathiTrust Research Center: New Opportunities through Computational Analysis of HathiTrust Digital Library 2014-2018

Time frame
2014-2018
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$1,000,000.00
Funding agency
HathiTrust

The HathiTrust has provided funding for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), colocated at University of Illinois and Indiana University, to serve as the research arm of the HathiTrust and create an agile, technology-rich service for researchers in the digital humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and informatics. This service will help researchers conduct nonconsumptive research on…

How the Page Matters

Total funding to date
$9,000.00
Funding agency
University of Illinois Research Board

Bonnie Mak's book, "How the Page Matters," historicizes recent debates about eBooks and similar technologies by casting the page as an interface that has been under development since the scrolls of Antiquity. "How the Page Matters" tracks the page through the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the printed books of the early modern period, and onto digital displays. By locating the page in a…

Identifying Potential Bias in Science Using Citation Network Structures

Time frame
2020-2022
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$29,960.00
Funding agency
Campus Research Board

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

abstract science concept

Impact of Data Quality and Provenance

Time frame
2014-2017
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$130,475.00
Funding agency
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information

How do limitations and intransparencies in data quality and data provenance bias research outcomes, and how can we detect and mitigate these limitations? For example, we have been investigating the impact of entity resolution errors on network analysis results. We found that commonly reported network metrics and derived implications can strongly deviate from the truth—as established based on…

Implications of a Digital Revolution

Total funding to date
$14,000.00
Funding agency
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

Notably absent in the current rush to digitize newspapers and books are critical investigations of the processes and products of this work. Such examinations are forestalled, Bonnie Mak argues, by a rhetoric of revolution that determines how the phenomenon should be constituted and studied, just as it continues to do for the so-called printing revolution of the fifteenth century. Her analysis…

Improving Patient Outcomes by Listening to Their Social Media Communications

Time frame
2017-2019
Investigator
Ian Brooks
Total funding to date
$15,000.00
Funding agency
Homecare Education Advocacy & Resource Team Support

It is difficult to understand the effectiveness of various treatment options when a huge number of external factors such as lifestyle, diet, and environment affect the burden of a disease. A major barrier to understanding is the challenge of scale—sampling enough patients to separate the major, minor, and negligible factors. With access to a database of more than one trillion public social…

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