Graduate School of Library and Information Science - University of Illinois

GSLIS alumni elected to leadership positions

cashwill — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:40:12 +0000

Several GSLIS alumni were recently elected to serve in leadership positions for state and national library associations.

Elizabeth Beers (MS ’06; CAS ’09), also a former LEEP adjunct faculty instructor, was elected as secretary/treasurer for ALA’s Library Research Round Table (LRRT). Beers will serve a two-year term beginning July 1, 2013.

Keshia Garnett (MS ’01) and Amanda E. Standerfer (MS ’99) have been elected as directors-at-large on the Illinois Library Association (ILA) Board of Directors. They are among four newly-elected directors-at-large who will serve three-year terms beginning July 1, 2013.

Lizz Zitron (MS ’09) has been elected as a councilor-at-large on the Council of the American Library Association (ALA). The 33 newly-elected councilors-at-large will serve three-year terms beginning at the conclusion of the 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

NSF grant supports Efron's work in search

kimsch — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:19:55 +0000

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.

Even as good as search can be, Miles Efron wants to make search better. Efron, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is working on new algorithms that build upon the current strengths of search but add a new dimension—time.

“We are at a point where soon we won’t have the luxury of ignoring the temporal aspect of data,” said Efron. “In order for search to be successful, time has to make its way into search engines.” Efron’s three-year project is supported by a $408,908 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Temporal information about data is often available but, to date, there has not been a concerted effort to build technology that incorporates time factors into search. Most people use time, however, to decide whether or not a search result is relevant to their query. Sometimes it is most important that a result be the most current information on the topic, for example, while other times users are interested in results that are bounded by a particular time frame. Efron suggests that if we track the traces of information that are created as documents, collections, and language change over time, we will be better able to predict relevance, thus vastly improving search.

“In domains like search over social media, time gives us an extra piece of information when we try to predict which documents are relevant to a particular person. For instance, one of the most common problems in search is term weighting—identifying which words in documents and queries are the most indicative of their overall subject matter. An early result from this line of research showed that analyzing how a word's usage changes over time gives us a new way to model its more directly semantic properties,” said Efron.

In conjunction with his research, Efron is developing open-source software that can be used to improve information retrieval courses, especially those taught in iSchools. The software will include a series of labs that will illustrate how search engines work and will be informed in large part by the structure of Efron’s current courses in information retrieval at GSLIS.

The grant runs through September, 2015.

Master's students present posters at MAC 2013 Annual Meeting

cashwill — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:23:41 +0000

Several GSLIS master’s students were among fourteen students selected to present posters at the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) Annual Meeting held this past April in Indianapolis.

Rachel Lux took second place for her poster, “All A-Twitter: Archiving the Public Record 140 Characters at a Time,” while Sarah Hoover earned third place for her poster, “Digitization for the Digital Humanities: Addressing Needs and Anticipating Uses.” Liza Booker, Mandi Goodsett, and Rachel Mattson also presented posters. The posters were judged on content, value to the profession, originality of the topic, and how the topic was presented.

The Midwest Archives Conference is the nation’s largest regional professional association for archivists, and their annual meeting brings together archivists, curators, and information professionals from across the country. Several of the posters and presentations from the conference can be found on the MAC website.

GSLIS students, alumni present at ISLMA mini-conferences

cashwill — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:11:42 +0000

Several GSLIS students and alumni presented at a series of mini-conferences held by the Illinois School Library Media Association over the past month.

The following presentations and workshops were given on April 20 at Westfield Middle School in Bloomingdale, Illinois:

"More Than Just a Handsome Face: Male Protagonists in YA Literature and Their Struggles with Body Issues"
Leanne Brown (master's student)
This presentation provided a comprehensive, thematic list of young adult fiction and nonfiction that feature a male protagonist who has some type of physical struggle—a speech impediment, a birth defect, or weight issues, etc.

"Tumblring Storytelling"
Mary Dubbs (master's student)
Tumblr can be used to collect and organize storytelling ideas and experiences, as well as connect with other relevant storytelling Tumblrs for inspiration and networking. This presentation was based on a final project for a storytelling course: http://minnestory.tumblr.com/.

"Exploring Anti-racism in School Libraries: Contributions and Gaps"
Miriam Larson (M.S. ’12; C.A.S. student)
During this workshop, participants examined existing scholarship about racism in librarianship and then looked at several scenarios and discussed how librarians might play a role in working towards racial justice. This workshop was based on Larson’s masters’ thesis project.

"Using Visual Primary Sources"
Jeanné Lohfink (M.S. ’00)
This workshop taught participants how to utilize an analysis tool created by the Library of Congress, learn two ideas on how to bring primary sources that use pictures into the classroom, and where to find them.

The following presentations and workshops were given on April 27 at Charleston High School in Charleston, Illinois:

"Maximizing the Monarch"
Peggy Burton (MS ’03) and Jennifer Muzzy
Burton and Muzzy announced the 2014 nominated titles for the annual Monarch Award list. Concrete activities to tie books to genres, author studies, the Common Core and more were also presented.

"Pin It! Mark It! Tag It!"
Gretchen Zaitzeff (master's student)
This presentation examined social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Delicious, and Diigo and strategies to help students enhance their personal and academic research.

"Reeling for Literature: A Media Specialist Teaching How to Watch Films in Class"
Anna McClellan (master's student)
In this workshop, participants learned the basics of educating students on film techniques. By having students analyze lighting, angles, and framing as they watch, an educator can combine critical thinking skills with the students’ interests in multimedia.

"What's Happening in the Library?!!?"
Gretchen Zaitzeff (master's student) and Latrice Ferguson
5 BIG programming ideas—one for each day of the week—to draw students and faculty into the library were presented.

Irish awarded IAS Colston Research Fellowship

kimsch — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:05:38 +0000

Sharon Irish, project coordinator at the GSLIS Center for Digital Inclusion and lecturer at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded a 2013-2014 Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Colston Research Fellowship from the University of Bristol in Bristol, England. The IAS Colston Research Fellowship is a multidisciplinary award that draws distinguished scholars from around the world to Bristol to enhance research at the university and collaborate on research projects specifically relevant to the Bristol area.

Irish will investigate the roles of historical research and community-based organizations in the engagement, production, and sharing of local knowledge in marginal communities. She will work closely with Productive Margins, a collaborative program between the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff and area residents, as well as the Knowle West Media Centre, a local media and technology center with which she has been working since 2010.

“I am thrilled to have the chance to continue working with the staff of the Knowle West Media Centre, and to have a formal connection to faculty at the University of Bristol,” Irish said. “In my previous work in Bristol, I began forming connections among cultural and educational institutions, like the Local Studies division of the Bristol Public Library. This time, I plan to delve into the Bristol Record Office, the first borough record office in the country, which holds local archives that I never have had time to explore.”

As a fellow, Irish will serve as an IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol’s Department of Drama: Film, Theatre and Television for two months. In addition to continuing her research, the award will allow Irish to share her current and previous work on publicly engaged artists Suzanne Lacy and Stephen Willats and others through a series of workshops, lectures, and film screenings.

“This appointment will support my collaborations with the community-based media centre, assist my research on art practices that emerge out of diverse partnerships, and give me the opportunity to learn from colleagues and archives in Bristol," Irish said.

Reflections on Inclusion: Allen Renear

cashwill — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:36:13 +0000

GSLIS Interim Dean and Professor Allen Renear recently discussed the value of inclusion in his teaching and research with Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre. His remarks are part of a new interview series exploring the School’s efforts to respect varied perspectives and diversity of experiences.

Renear teaches courses in information modeling, data curation, and digital publishing. His research focuses on issues in the development of formal ontologies for managing scientific and cultural objects, and the use of those ontologies in information system design, particularly information systems that support data curation, scholarly publishing, and the digital humanities.

I’d like to speak here primarily as a faculty member not as dean, and I’ll probably be talking mostly about my teaching in the master’s curriculum.

In my commitment statement, I described inclusion as being at the very heart of our mission at GSLIS. We are a professional school at a land-grant public university. As such, our overarching goal cannot be anything other than to advance the public good and meet the varied needs of all members of society. To achieve this, we must empower diverse communities and groups to achieve full participation in all aspects of our information institutions. And this is not just about equal benefits—it is equally about participation in the design, shaping, and operation of these institutions.

My courses, which usually focus on information modeling, are often described as fairly technical and abstract, and so it may not be clear at first glance how the content promotes inclusion. But I think the inclusion connection is profound. When information is poorly organized, or accessed through information systems and services that are poorly designed, then, of course, that information cannot be easily found or effectively used. But the consequences of poor organization and design do not affect all communities uniformly. The damage falls more heavily on those who lack just the right tools, expertise, financial resources, support, background, social connections, language or culture; or who have interests that fall outside the mainstream, or who have distinctive physical or perceptual needs. Groups or individuals without those resources or with needs some distance from the median are therefore disproportionately disadvantaged when systems fail. Moreover, this is not just about simple access, but about effective use and reuse. Poorly organized information cannot be easily adapted to unanticipated needs and applications in the future; it will tend to be used to support the same things in the same way. And even then it will be misunderstood and misused.

I have seen this dynamic over and over in the information industry. If you (or your family, community, company, country, organization) are in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, time, money, expertise, knowledge, craft practices, language, culture, physical and perceptual capabilities, etc., and your interests and objectives are anticipated, then you can often manage, at least somewhat, with poorly designed systems and poorly organized information. But without those advantages you cannot achieve the same access, at least not without much additional effort. I don’t want to minimize the complexity of the “digital divide,” or the potential of that notion to obfuscate realities, but I can’t resist saying that the digital divide is as wide as it is in part because the negative consequences of poorly organized systems and information are not uniformly distributed: they burden some more than others. And the cycle is vicious: Lack of access due to a disadvantaged position creates additional disadvantages.

For instance, creating systems that treat non-Western writing systems on a par with Western writing systems isn’t easy, and to some information system designers it may not seem worth the trouble. But if you don’t accomplish this, then not only will many individual users be at a disadvantage, but there are consequences for entire communities and cultures who will find their visibility diminished and their participation in the modern digital world hampered. During the 1990s, I worked on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which was creating an encoding scheme for culturally significant texts. It was an international effort, and we were all committed to being culturally inclusive. So we were painfully aware that not only was our documentation in English, the TEI elements, attributes, and attribute values were also in English, and our examples were mostly Latin-based Western writing systems based on Latin characters. But accommodating multilingual content and non-Western writing systems was a TEI commitment. So, over the years the TEI and other communities committed to inclusive systems have made much progress.

Another example is competing proprietary data formats. In LIS our professional values encourage us to identify and analyze cases where market failures have damaging social effects, and then to look for solutions. In my electronic publishing class, I describe my own experience as chair of the working group developing a data format for ebooks (now in use as ePUB). There was a danger that commercial companies might deploy several different proprietary data formats in an effort to lock in users to their products, control third party tools, and erect high barriers to smaller or newer businesses wishing to enter in the market. These formats would not only have the obvious negative social effects of artificially discouraging competition, innovation, and new businesses, but also would establish as industry standards inflexible, non-interoperable, low-performance formats that would not support low-cost reading systems, non-Western textual content, readers for the blind, and such, and that would discourage innovative specialized tools and applications. Indeed it looked to us like this competition on format might actually doom the industry as a whole, benefitting no one in the end.

My group, which included other members from the LIS community, took on this threat and worked with industry partners to develop a single XML-based content specification that was built on top of existing nonproprietary standards and fundamental principles of information organization. We wanted to ensure broad access regardless of language, culture, and financial resources, and to shift industry competition away from wasteful format lock-in strategies to innovation in functionality and support the development of a wide range of useful third-party tools. In helping students see how well-defined (and well-defended!) standards can be used as instruments to maximize participation and long-term economic benefit, I hope I am preparing them to become agents of inclusion not just as individuals but also in support of collective efforts. Obviously good intentions aren’t enough. The LIS and nonprofit participants in this industry group had to work with industry representatives to carefully craft a format specification that met the very complex requirements of multiple stakeholders. And we had to find our way to the best compromise: Proprietary formats still exist, and can be socially damaging (unfortunately), but at least we have larger framework where an alternative principled nonproprietary format has a privileged position.

A complete account of the connection between inclusion and the principles of information modeling is a long story, but I think I can sum up the key ideas. At the heart of principled information system design is, of course, a needs analysis that considers all possible stakeholders, and involves all possible stakeholders, and that continues to respond to user experiences as systems and services are deployed and achievements and drawbacks emerge. Within the resulting information systems and services are information models that reflect the results of this initial and ongoing needs analysis. In constructing these models it is critical that the underlying assumptions be explicitly identified, documented, and, most importantly, capable of being easily changed—whether the change is an adaptation or a correction. Models of this sort not only support flexibility and responsiveness and remove barriers to adjustments, but they also make their commitments open to public inspection and provide opportunities for analysis and conversation.

At GSLIS, everything we teach about information organization not only improves effectiveness and efficiency of information access and management, but also levels the playing field, bringing more people to the table, both designers and users, right from the beginning. The inclusion of all stakeholders is about finding and mobilizing all the insight and understanding and ingenuity needed to make progress, and then making that case for good design clearly and forcefully.

Let me also say a little bit about how my approach to teaching my MS classes is inclusive. At the foundation of my approach to teaching here at GSLIS is the assumption that my students are all adults who are taking control of their own professional education. They come to my class from many different backgrounds and preparations, and they come for many different reasons. I want to accommodate this diversity and meet their needs. To do that I make as few restrictive assumptions as possible about backgrounds or interests. And I focus my courses directly on what I believe to be the most important content for twenty-first century information professionals, removing from the course curriculum anything that is unnecessary, that might a reduce participation and benefit without some compensating advantage. My courses are not contests optimized to discriminate relative performance at the end of the semester; that is something I have little interest in (beyond what it tells me about my own performance as an instructor). I structure my courses to maximize learning for diverse audiences, and I never trade off that objective for anything else. There are enough contests in the world; no need for me to add another.

This does not mean that I focus on the practical needs of the first job. Just the opposite, as all my students will attest (which is not to say they all approve). To optimize a course for the first year in the workplace only ensures that students will be at a relative disadvantage in the second year, and even more so in the tenth and twentieth. Few things are as damaging to an information professional’s career, or effectiveness, than a curriculum designed to prepare them for their first job. My courses are relentlessly and unapologetically theoretical precisely because that is what is empowering in the long run. Moreover, while a superficial and excessively vocational education is a disadvantage to everyone, this is yet another disadvantage that is not distributed uniformly: if you have modest resources or are situated away from the median in background and interests then you will suffer much more from not having acquired a solid theoretical foundation for lifelong vocational learning. And those you are trying to serve will also suffer for your missed opportunities.

I’ll end by saying that in the classroom I get an enormous benefit from diverse perspectives, either when I am being presented with unanticipated problems, or with innovative solutions. I welcome challenge and contradiction and find losing an argument more satisfying than winning one. I’d like to think that part of my expertise in the classroom lies in eliciting the often superior insights of others, insights based on different experiences, interests, and intellectual commitments. This is a collaborative dynamic that I think benefits everyone.

Public Lecture: Masooda Bashir

cashwill — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:25:48 +0000

Title:
At the Nexus of Digital Information, Psychology, and Society: Opportunities and Future Prospects

Presenter:
Masooda Bashir, Ph.D., Information Trust Institute, Coordinated Science Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract:
As the amount of digital information around us has increased by leaps and bounds, and our lives increasingly depend on technology, issues of trust, privacy, and security in this digital ecosystem are also becoming increasingly important. In this talk, I will discuss how those three factors intersect from a psychological point of view as it relates to information technology. Privacy in digital information, especially as it relates to cloud computing, needs to be critically examined. Critically important aspects include users’ knowledge and awareness of digital privacy on the cloud and issues of policy and baseline protections for personal information. Trust is a psychological parameter that can be dissected and quantified, especially as it relates to human interaction with automated or computing systems. Finally, as we place more trust in digital information and automation, the human aspects of cyber-security are an important dimension that is often overlooked. Analysis of cognitive factors such as memory, assessment of the personalities of the individuals involved in cyber-security, subsequent behavior analysis, and possible behavior modification can be important in managing the human aspects of cyber-security.

Biography:
Masooda Bashir received her undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science and her Ph.D. in psychology from Purdue University. She worked for several years as a systems analyst, technical trainer, manager, and global manager for a number of high-tech corporations in Silicon Valley, including Lotus and IBM. She is currently the assistant director for Social Trust Initiatives in the Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bashir’s areas of expertise include the interface of psychological and social sciences with engineering systems and information technology. She guides and conducts ITI research from a social science and social trust perspective. In addition, Bashir is a leader of multiple ITI educational initiatives, including the summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates internship program and the Illinois Cyber Security Scholarship Program.

Location:

126 LIS

Event Date:

Fri, 05/10/2013 - 10:00am

McDonough speaks with CBC about preserving games, culture

kimsch — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:53:05 +0000

Associate Professor Jerome McDonough recently was a guest on CBC Radio’s Spark with Nora Young. McDonough spoke with Young about digital preservation and gaming, emphasizing the importance of preserving not only the software and the servers, but also the nuances of gaming culture and history.

“What do we need to preserve about the game, that isn’t the game? What do we need to document in terms of social history of games…because if we don’t have that history, how are scholars really going to interpret this game in the future? It was a particular problem for us when we looked at Second Life because I can preserve the server software. I can preserve the databases. I can preserve the client software used to interact with Second Life. But I can’t preserve the people. And if I don’t have a record of the social activity and the social interactions that occurred there, what I’m going to have in 50 years is basically the neutron-bombed version of Second Life. I’ve got a lot of architecture, I’ve got a lot of landscape, and no people and no history.”

The full podcast is available here and McDonough’s interview begins at minute 42:45.

2013 LAMP Summer Institute

mclaugh — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:54:52 +0000

Please visit the 2013 Summer Institute website for more information and to register.

Event Date:

Thu, 05/30/2013 - Sun, 06/02/2013

Downie introduces HTRC to scholars at the University of Hong Kong

cashwill — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:03:19 +0000

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).

In his presentation, Downie outlined the mission and goals of the HTRC, a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and the HathiTrust Digital Repository. The HTRC enables advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge and ensures that this cultural record is preserved long into the future. Downie also shared current and planned projects, including work on enabling the nonconsumptive analyses of copyrighted materials. He concluded with a discussion of the ways in which scholars can work with and through the HTRC, which is open to institutions worldwide.

"GSLIS has a long and rich history of working with scholars in China, so I was very pleased to introduce the HTRC to this group of Hong Kong scholars," said Downie.

The Centre for Information Technology in Education promotes the use of information technology for quality education in Hong Kong, supporting several academic programs offered by the Faculty of Education to teachers, educators, and education-related professionals to enhance their knowledge and skills. It also offers in-service professional development training to educators and consultancy services to the community concerning the educational use of information technology.

Students to present at LOEX Annual Conference

cashwill — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:15:00 +0000

Five GSLIS master's students will make presentations at the LOEX Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 2-4, 2013. The conference, which focuses on information literacy and instruction, is a long-standing event in a field that is highly competitive for presentations and registration. Presentations include:

Blogging is Half the Battle: Best Practices for Content Development, Implementation and Addressing Patrons’ Needs with Social Media"
Presenter: Rachel A. Lux

Social media is regularly used in the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructional tool. Blogs, social network platforms and photo/visual accounts can all highlight and point to resources and services around the library. But simply linking to items isn’t enough. This poster explores ways to create dynamic social media use policies and procedures; develop content that is timely, meaningful and makes the biggest instructional impact; and use analytics and online patron interactions to guide future content decisions.

"Drawing Out the Melody: An Approach to Organizing and Analyzing Qualitative Assessment Data"
Presenter: Emma Clausen

Met with a voluminous stack of files filled with rich feedback, a librarian’s biggest barrier to utilizing qualitative assessment data is implementing a streamlined method for organization and analysis. This poster presentation will illustrate an analytical approach that grew out of working with over 4,000 qualitative comments from 15 events. Librarians will benefit from learning how to preserve necessary relationships among data points that facilitate analysis and encourage a move away from static text files. This time-saving approach will empower librarians to use everyday tools to complete the assessment process and effect change on assessment results reporting and decision making.

"LibGuides and Savvy Shorts for Distance Learners: An Assessment of Impact"
Presenters: Ben Murphy and Cate Kompare

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library offers a series of popular Savvy Researcher workshops on topics ranging from library orientation to organizing a job search to getting started with GIS. But many non-traditional students, especially those enrolled in LEEP—the distance education option at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science—have requested an online or asynchronous alternative. This poster describes using LibGuides embedded with Savvy Shorts videos as a way to model both the structure and active learning elements of an in-person Savvy Researcher class, and reports on a survey of LEEP students who used the LibGuide.

"Personal Information Management"
Presenter: Erik Radio

The task of organizing personal information is a process that has grown more complex as new kinds of information become available and in different mediums. The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a Personal Information Management workshop on building effective methods of information management, focusing on new software and applications to aid in this endeavor. Additionally, there is an emphasis on how to stay current with new developments in information management. This poster describes the content of these workshops as well as their considerable utility in equipping students for academic success.

Computer Security Open Forum/Panel

cashwill — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:24:54 +0000

To follow up with last week's "Thinking Security" talk, Erich Heine will return, along with two colleagues: Tim Yardley and Warren Raquel, serving as a panel. They will discuss computer security issues relevant to libraries and librarians and take your questions on this and other computer security topics.

About the Panel:

For the last decade Warren Raquel has been an IT security analyst with CITES Security, performing digital forensics and incident response for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Just recently, Raquel has transitioned to NCSA's CyberSecurity Directorate where he is head of Security Operations and Incident Response.

Tim Yardley is the assistant director for Testbed Services and a senior researcher on trustworthy operation of critical infrastructure. He leads efforts to provide realistic test environments to replicate complex system operation from the field to enable cutting-edge research. In addition to his core research, Yardley has been involved in system security design, assessments, and penetration tests for some of the world's most secure entities and continues to work towards solutions to solve security issues globally. Having been both a security professional who targets systems and one who defends systems, he provides a unique perspective on threat vectors and policy enforcement to effect those vectors.

Erich Heine is a senior research programmer for the Information Trust Institute at the University of IIllinois. His background is in computer networking, and he currently works in secure communications for the Power grid. His current work is building security appliances for monitoring and control systems, with the intent of securing existing and future power grid operations.

The talk will also be available live in the main Blackboard Collaborate Meeting Room through this link:

https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=407&password=GSLISMtgRMparticpant

If you experience any issues in trying to access the Blackboard Meeting Room, please contact the GSLIS Help Desk at (217) 244-4903 or (800) 377-1892.

Location:

LIS 131 and VIRTUAL

Event Date:

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Free Digital Local & Family History Workshop

mclaugh — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:36:08 +0000

Plan to attend the free Digital Local & Family History Workshop, which will be led by trained professionals from the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Community Informatics Research Lab, with local co-sponsorship by Western Illinois University Archives.

This workshop will feature advice and discussion related to:

how to build volunteerism, partnerships, and funding in your local community around digital local and family history projects.
how to find and use low-cost tools for digitizing print, photos, videos, and oral memories.
how to find and use free tools to build digital websites about local and family stories.
how to manage projects, including copyright and privacy issues involved in digital history.
how to use state and national support networks.
how to preserve digital and digitized history.

This workshop is open to any and all interested members of the public, including genealogists, local historians, church historians, school teachers, and anyone else interested in using digital technologies to share, research, and develop interest in local and family histories. Especially encouraged to attend are representatives from public libraries, museums, historical societies, genealogy societies, churches, schools, local governments, and other groups. Participants are encouraged, but to required, to bring ideas of projects they would like to launch, and/or content they would like help digitizing.

For more information and to register visit our website. If you have questions, please contact "Noah Lenstra"-nlenstr2, at illinois.edu- (217-300-1652) or "Dr. Jeff Hancks"-malpass-archives, at wiu.edu-, WIU Archives (309-298-2717).

Location:

Western Illinois University, Malpass Library, 1 University Circle, Macomb, Illinois

Event Date:

Sat, 06/22/2013 - 10:30am - 5:00pm

Graduate Student Research Forum: Andrea Olinger and Jon W. Stone

mclaugh — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:47:52 +0000

"Styling Science: A Case Study of Enculturation into Disciplinary Writing Style "
presented by Andrea Olinger, Department of English

In writing studies, the meaning of the term "style" tends to be assumed and undefined or loosely defined—as, say, a writer's linguistic and rhetorical choices. In either case, style is typically treated as static property controlled by the writer, with little attention given to its interpretation and reception. Disciplinary style has suffered from similar inattenation, with the neat, discrete notion that different disciplines write differently often going unquestioned. Empirical research within writing studies on the co-constructed, dynamic nature of style, disciplinary or otherwise, is scarce. In this talk, I argue for a more rigorous and usable understanding of enculturation into disciplinary writing styles. Drawing on sociocultural, dialogic approaches to language, I describe writing styles as hetergeneous collections of multisemiotic resources with situated histories. I then ground this theory in ethnographic research on how academic writing styles are represented, debated, learned, and taught, presenting one particular case of writers in psychology. Through literacy history and text-based interviews with a senior psychology major and her professor—along with analyses of drafts of her honors thesis and the professor's writing guide—I explore the difficulties of locating discipline-specific writing style, show that particular language ideologies dominate how writers understand style, and illustrate how a dialogic perspective can help us better understand disciplinary enculturation into this nebulous thing called style.

"Inventing Jazz: Jelly Roll Morton and the Sonic Rhetorics of Vernacular Musical Performance "
presented by Jon W. Stone, Department of English

In May of 1938, Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton arrived at the Library of Congress claiming to be the inventor of jazz. Alan Lomax, the folklorist in charge of the music archive there in Washington D.C., was skeptical. He was weary of the type of jazz that dominated the radio, jazz that white performers had appropriated to make more "accessible," more commercial. But Morton's story, which included roots in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, compelled Lomax, who later remarked: "I thought I'd take this cat on [and] see how much folk music a jazz musician knows."
My presentation focuses on key moments of Morton's recorded argument for his own authenticity as an originator of jazz music and for his place in the larger historical mythos of jazz. We'll listen together for three layers of sonic rhetoricity that Morton develops in the interviews with Lomax. In the first, Morton uses detailed oral history as a deliberative argument against other musicians' claims for the authorship of jazz. In the second, Morton's virtuosic musical skill works as a kind of epideictic arete tied to the distinguishing and disciplining of certain social and musical values in the jazz community. In the third, Morton declares and demonstrates how "jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune." In other words, in the same way that eloquence is the result of applying the art of rhetoric to language, jazz is the result of deploying a distinct set of musical skills to a melody. In this way, jazz can be thought of as a rhetoric of music, and Morton a sonic rhetorician.

For more information contact "Teresa Bertram"-tbertram, at illinois.edu- at 333-3251.

Location:

126 LIS Building

Event Date:

Thu, 05/02/2013 - 4:00pm - 5:30pm

GSLIS graduation tassels now available

cashwill — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:27:25 +0000

Graduation is approaching, and at this time of the year, we reflect on those individuals who have made a difference in our lives. New graduates and alumni are encouraged to honor GSLIS faculty and/or staff through the LSAA Tassel Project, which was established in 2011 by the Library School Alumni Association (LSAA) to support the creation of an endowed professorship in the School.

With a contribution of $20, you can honor a faculty or staff member who had an impact on your GSLIS educational experience. To thank you for your contribution, you will receive a commemorative yellow GSLIS tassel. All who participate will be recognized in the GSLIS Alumni Newsletter, and those faculty or staff honored will be notified.

The LSAA has designated the LSAA Endowed Professorship to receive proceeds from the Tassel Project. Family and friends may wish to recognize the achievement of new graduates by purchasing a tassel on their behalf.

To participate, visit our Opportunities for Giving page and select the "Faculty" tab, choose "LSAA Endowed Professorship," and click the "Make your gift" button. Be sure to include the name of the faculty or staff member you would like to honor in the "Special Instructions" box.

For students who are on campus and wish to have their tassels for graduation day, please stop by the Advancement Office at 122 LIS (8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.) to make your gift and pick up your tassel.