Faculty, students, and staff from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois will participate in iConference 2014, which will be held March 4-7 in Berlin.

The annual iConference, hosted by the iSchools organization, brings together scholars, researchers, and information professionals from around the world. The theme of the ninth annual conference, which will take place at Humboldt University of Berlin, is "Breaking Down Walls: Culture-Context-Computing."

Presentations, posters, and workshops

March 4

"What can the study of information do to genre studies? (Workshop 8)," panelists include GSLIS Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak, who will present a paper on genres of publication

"Exploring the Social Studies of Information (Workshop 7)," participants include GSLIS Professor Alistair Black

"Digital Collection Contexts: Intellectual and Organizational Functions at Scale (Workshop 4)," organized by GSLIS Professor and Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) Carole L. Palmer and CIRSS Senior Project Coordinator Megan Senseney in collaboration with partners from The Europeana Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin.

March 5

Paper Session 2: Blocking Information Access, "The Geography of Censorship: Communities, Challengers, and Harry Potter," GSLIS Assistant Professor Emily Knox

Paper Session 5: Data Curation, "How Databases Learn," GSLIS doctoral student Andrea K. Thomer and GSLIS Professor Michael B. Twidale

Paper Session 5: Data Curation, "Meeting Data Workforce Needs: Indicators Based on Recent Data Curation Placements," GSLIS Professor and Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship Carole L. Palmer; GSLIS doctoral student Cheryl Annette Thompson; GSLIS doctoral student Karen S. Baker; CIRSS Senior Project Coordinator Megan Senseney

SIE 3: "Information and Marginality: Ethical Issues," presenters include GSLIS Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer Martin Wolske

Social Media Expo: "Local Vocal: Where Design Thinking Meets Social Media and Creates Civic Engagement and Social Entrepreneurship," GSLIS doctoral student Kinyetta Lashawn Nance; GSLIS master’s student William K. Langston; GSLIS master’s student Christopher Nixon; GSLIS Research Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Digital Inclusion Jon Gant, advisor

Social Media Expo: "SentiNets: User Classification Based on Sentiment for Social Causes within a Twitter Network," GSLIS master’s student in bioinformatics Sneha Agarwal; GSLIS doctoral student Jinlong Guo; GSLIS doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra; GSLIS doctoral student Kirstin Phelps; GSLIS master’s student Johna Picco; GSLIS Assistant Professor Jana Diesner, advisor

March 6

Paper Session 11: Discussing Data Quality, "Computational Assessment of the Impact of Social Justice Documentaries," presenters include GSLIS Assistant Professor Jana Diesner; GSLIS Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of History at St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Susie Pak; GSLIS doctoral student Jinseok Kim

Paper Session 15: Information Sharing, "Wiki as a Platform—Turning Dissemination into Collaboration," GSLIS Visiting Senior Research Programmer Craig S. Evans

Paper Session 17: "Improving Inclusion," GSLIS Research Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Digital Inclusion Jon Gant, session chair

Poster Session 2: "Extending Curation profiles to study enterprise-level data practices," GSLIS doctoral student Nicholas Matthew Weber and GSLIS Professor and Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship Carole L. Palmer

Poster Session 2: "Identifying Descriptive Indicators for Research Data from Scientific Journal Publications," GSLIS doctoral student Tiffany Chao

Poster Session 2: "Using collections and worksets in large-scale corpora: Preliminary findings from the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis project," presenters include GSLIS doctoral student Katrina Fenlon; CIRSS Senior Project Coordinator Megan Senseney; CIRSS Postdoctoral Research Associate Sayan Bhattacharyya; GSLIS doctoral student Craig Willis; GSLIS doctoral student Peter Organisciak; GSLIS Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie

Poster Session 2: "Action at a Distance: how ordinary people self organize humanitarian efforts remotely and collaboratively?," GSLIS doctoral student Aiko Takazawa

Poster Session 2: "Using Named Entity Recognition as a Classification Heuristic," GSLIS doctoral student Andrea K. Thomer and GSLIS doctoral student Nicholas M. Weber

Poster Session 2: "Agricultural Information and the State in the Late 19th Century: The Annual Reports of the United States Department of Agriculture," GSLIS doctoral candidate Christine D'Arpa

March 7

SIE 13: "History in the iSchools," GSLIS Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak; GSLIS Professor Dan Schiller; GSLIS Professor Alistair Black

SIE 16: "Social Justice in Library and Information Science," Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama Miriam E. Sweeney (PhD '13); GSLIS Assistant Professor Nicole A. Cooke; GSLIS doctoral student Melissa Villa-Nicholas; GSLIS affiliated faculty member and Assistant Professor, College of Media, Safiya U. Noble (MS '09, PhD '12)

--