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NSF grant supports Efron's work in search
May. 14, 2013

Every day billions of queries are typed into search boxes on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. Data centers around the world swell with vast amounts of information. Twitter and Facebook see a constant stream of activity.

We may not give it much thought when our fingers sweep rapidly over the keys looking for that article we heard about or directions to the restaurant, but searching through massive amounts of data is no small feat. Nor is the ability to produce an accurate search result, one that gets closely to the core of what we are searching.

Downie introduces HTRC to scholars at the University of Hong Kong
May. 1, 2013

J. Stephen Downie, GSLIS professor and associate dean for research, recently presented "Unlocking the Secrets of 3 Billion Pages: Introducing the HathiTrust Research Center," at the Centre for Information Technology in Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. Downie is co-director HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC).

New tools available to mine world's largest digital repository of books
Apr. 22, 2013

This week the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from over 70 research libraries around the world. The new tools provide a much-needed entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrust’s contents.

“All of us at Indiana University and the University of Illinois, who have been working toward this release for the last year, can be proud of enabling a first round of shared computation tools for the HathiTrust corpus,” said Beth Plale, professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing and co-director of the HTRC. “Now we can share this framework for...

Noble writes op-ed for The Root
Mar. 22, 2013

Safiya Noble (MS ’09, PhD ’12), GSLIS alumna, affiliated faculty member, and assistant professor of African-American Studies at Illinois, has published an op-ed, "Google equates black girls with sex; why?" on the popular website The Root. Noble's work on how race and gender are reflected in search was the basis of her dissertation.

The full article is available on The Root. Here is an excerpt:

Noble discusses stereotypes and search with U of I News Bureau
Feb. 19, 2013

GSLIS affiliated faculty member Safiya Noble (MS ’09, PhD ’12) was interviewed by the University of Illinois News Bureau for their campus feature A Minute With… where she discussed how stereotypes, especially of black women and girls, affect results in search engines. This topic was the core of Noble’s doctoral research, and her dissertation was titled, "Searching for Black Girls: Old Traditions in New Media." Noble is an assistant professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Illinois. The interview was conducted by Craig...

Video describes HathiTrust Research Center, features co-director Downie
Feb. 12, 2013

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), a collaboration launched in 2011 by the University of Illinois and Indiana University, is developing software tools and cyberinfrastructure to provide researchers with advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

The following informational video, produced by HTRC, addresses issues surrounding access to digital cultural heritage materials in the HathiTrust Digital Libraries and opportunities for accessing metadata to study large-scale patterns in literary history. It features HTRC co-director Stephen Downie...

Diesner receives XSEDE allocation award
Feb. 8, 2013

Jana Diesner, assistant professor, has received a start-up allocation award from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). This award provides Diesner and her co-PI Brent Fegley, a doctoral student in the Informatics program, with time on XSEDE’s high-performance computing resources and help from XSEDE staff members with parallelizing their code. The overall goal with this project is to build prediction models for an entity extractor that covers and goes beyond the set of entity classes that are typically considered by entity extractors such that the resulting technology becomes particularly useful for...


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