SEASR, subawarded through Stanford University, fosters collaboration by empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual work environments. This eases scholars’ access to digital research materials, which currently are stored in a variety of incompatible formats.

The Sowing Seeds project will establish a new community technology center (CTC) in Danville, Illinois, and expand basic training to this and four existing CTCs in Champaign-Urbana and East St. Louis, Illinois. Basic skills are just the gateway, however. The grant will allow for expansion of our advanced digital media training focused on the development of skills necessary to meet the NETS…

Staff magazines in British organizations – from hospitals to government departments, from libraries to the first multi-national companies – first emerged in the late-nineteenth century. They varied widely in circulation numbers, quality and editorial control. Staff magazines were a notable (though strangely overlooked by historians) product of the pre-computer information management revolution…

This proposal seeks add-on funding for a two-year Ford Foundation study begun in fall 2010: SIBR, or Statewide Illinois Broadband Research. The research uses the theory and methods of community informatics to ask: How will high-speed internet, specifically the federal broadband projects funded by the 2009 Recovery Act, impact society? We aim to find out: Is this public policy…

The goal of this research study is to examine the social and economic impact of the Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (“UC2B”) project.  The funding will support the analysis and reporting of the social and economic impact of the adoption of broadband services provided by the UC2B program and the development of a data archive to organize all of the data used to perform the analysis and…

Structural analysis of music (formal analysis) is one of the most fundamental analyses performed by music researchers, usually preceding any other types of analysis because it provides the overall view of the piece. Its importance is reflected by the fact that the course on formal analysis is often one of the core music undergraduate music curricula with several major textbooks on the subject…

Time affects information retrieval in many ways. Collections of documents change as new items are indexed. The content of documents themselves may change. Users submit queries at particular moments in time. And perhaps most importantly, people’s assessment of a document’s relevance to a query is often time-dependent. For example, searchers of news archives might seek information on a past…

We hypothesize that a flexible, configurable suite of automated informatics tools can reduce significantly the effort needed to generate systematic reviews of medical literature while maintaining or even improving their quality. To test this hypothesis, we propose:
Aim 1. To extend our research on automated RCT tagging to include additional study types and provide public resources.…

This HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) project seeks to produce the first large-scale cross-cultural study of the novel according to quantitative methods. Ever since its putative rise in the eighteenth century, the novel has emerged as a central means of expressing what it means to be modern. And yet despite this cultural significance, we still lack a comprehensive study of the novel’s place…

In this collaborative project, we are using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to identify secondary practical uses of research findings from final reports of grant funded work. Such reports are often stored in specialized databases, where long-term archiving activities focus on standardization, interoperability, and information indexing and retrieval. However, secondary use of…