The GSLIS News Digest highlights recent news, events, and accomplishments of GSLIS faculty, staff, and students. For more news, visit the GSLIS home page and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

News from GSLIS at Illinois

GSLIS Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie co-presented a poster titled, “Architecture to Enable Large-Scale Computational Analysis of Millions of Volumes” at the Digital Humanities annual conference held July 16-19, 2013, at the University of Nebraska. Co-presenters from the University of Illinois included: Loretta Auvil, senior project coordinator at the Illinois Informatics Institute (I3); Boris Capitanu, research programmer at I3; and Kirk Hess, digital humanities specialist for the University Library. Co-presenters from Indiana University included: Stacy Kowalczyk, Zong Peng, Beth Plale, Guangchen Ruan, Yiming Sun, Aaron Todd, and Jiaan Zeng.

Several GSLIS faculty participated in the 21st Annual Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) Conference, “Geographies of the Book,” held July 18-21 at the University of Pennsylvania. Associate Professor Christine Jenkins, Assistant Professor Emily Knox, and GSLIS alumna Marianne Martens (MS ’06) presented on a panel titled, “Community and Conflict: Geographies of Reading.” Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre and Assistant Professor Carol Tilley presented on the panel, “Reader/Writer/Disseminator: Geographies of the Communications Circuit.”

GSLIS Research Associate Professor Dave Dubin, Megan Senseney, project coordinator for research services at CIRSS, and Jacob Jett, graduate research assistant at CIRSS, presented their paper titled, “What It Is vs. How We Shall: Complementary Agendas for Data Models and Architectures,” at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013, held August 6-9. The paper has been published inProceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2013 (vol. 10).

GSLIS Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke, along with GSLIS alumna Merinda Kaye Hensley (MS ’06), instructional services librarian at the University of Illinois Library, were awarded a best paper award at the Eighth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS 8) held August 19-22 at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their paper was titled, “The Critical and Continuing Role of the LIS Curriculum in the Teacher Training of Future Librarians.” The award, given by the International Information Literacies Research Network, was elected by the audience.

GSLIS Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke wrote an op-ed piece titled, “Diversifying the LIS Faculty,”which was published in Library Journal’s “Backtalk” column on September 15. In tandem with the need to increase diversity in LIS student populations, Cooke called for recruitment efforts that will diversify LIS faculties.

GSLIS Professor Carole Palmer, director of CIRSS, delivered a keynote address at the second biannual plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The three-day meeting was held September 16-18 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and involved conversations between top leaders from the White House and US science agencies, and their international colleagues. Her keynote, "Fueling and Transforming Evidential Cultures of Research," was presented during a session on the Benefits and Possibilities of Open Data Sharing, chaired by CIRSS affiliated researcher Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management at the Johns Hopkins University. Video of the session, including Palmer's presentation, is available for viewing online.

GSLIS welcomes Ian Brooks, who has joined the staff as a research scientist. He will represent both GSLIS and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a liaison to the health sciences community. In this role, Brooks will help maintain and develop research relationships between GSLIS and NCSA in the area of health science information and work with GSLIS faculty on externally funded projects and new initiatives.

In September, GSLIS Professor Carole Palmer, director of CIRSS, received the 2013 Thomson ReutersOutstanding Information Science Teacher Award given by the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). She will be presented with the award at the 2013 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, which will be held November 1-5 in Montreal, Canada.

GSLIS Assistant Professor Masooda Bashir was recently invited to give a presentation to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees at their September meeting. Her talk, “A New Initiative in Digital Forensics Education,” introduced a new educational initiative in digital forensics (DF) currently underway at Illinois. The goal of the effort is to create a portable standard curriculum, one that is easily adopted by other institutions and that strongly reflects the multidisciplinary nature and breadth of digital forensics. It will cover not just technical topics but also law, forensics psychology, criminal justice, sociology, and business perspectives on digital forensics, all integrated into a coherent whole.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded GSLIS a $46,678 National Leadership Grant in September for the project, “Closing the App Gap.” The principal investigator is Deborah Stevenson, assistant professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books at GSLIS; Kate McDowell, GSLIS associate professor, will serve as co-PI.  Through the grant, GSLIS and the Douglass Branch of the Champaign (IL) Public Library will work together on a pilot project to investigate the benefits of blending technology with traditional summer reading programs with the goal of improving reading proficiency as well as digital literacy.

GSLIS Professor Carole Palmer, director of CIRSS, and Nicholas Weber, GSLIS doctoral candidate, shared their expertise in data curation at the John Deere Big Data Summit held October 1-2 in Champaign, Illinois. The summit brought together analytic and big data thought leaders from inside and outside the company to showcase cutting edge academic thinking, applications, and real-life examples. Palmer presented, “Data Curation: Investing in the Reuse Value of Digital Data,” and Weber presented, “Curating and Profiling Enterprise Data @ John Deere.”

GSLIS Professor and Interim Dean Allen Renear delivered a keynote address at the Text Encoding Initiative’s 2013 International Conference and Members’ Meeting. The theme of the conference, held October 2-5 in Rome, Italy, was “The Linked TEI: Text Encoding in the Web.” Renear’s address, “Text encoding, ontologies, and the future,” was delivered on October 2.

GSLIS Assistant Professor Carol Tilley attended New York Comic Con, October 11-14, and discussed “The Secret Origins of Comics Censorship” as part of a panel organized by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. A documentary about Tilley produced by the Big Ten Network, “Carol Tilley, Comic Book Crusader,” has been selected for the Iowa Independent Film Festival, which will be held October 25-27.

GSLIS Associate Professor Cathy Blake, CIRSS associate director; Ian Brooks, GSLIS research scientist; and ChengXiang Zhai, GSLIS-affiliated faculty member and associate professor in computer science, presented at “Share the Vision 2013”, a technology showcase highlighting the societal impact of research innovation held on October 10-11. The event featured breakthrough research in human health, bioinformatics, global challenges, advanced materials, and information technology. Blake presented, “Using the Claim Framework to Synthesize Evidence and Accelerate Scientific Discovery”; Brooks presented, “INDICATOR: Integrating Common Data Sources for Community Health Monitoring”; and Zhai presented, “General Statistical Methods for Integration and Analysis of Opinionated Text Data.”