Meet Our Graduate Assistants: Sarah Appedu

In this interview series we ask our graduate assistants questions for our readers to get to know them better. Our first interview this year is with Sarah Appedu!
Headshot of Sarah Appedu from the shoulders up

What is your background education and work experience?

Before attending graduate school, I worked as the Scholarly Communications Assistant in the academic library of a small liberal arts college. My work included overseeing the institutional repository, working with undergraduate journal editors, and assisting in our efforts to address the high cost of course materials through the promotion of open educational resources. This work inspired me to get my M.S. LIS and sparked my interest in pedagogy, open access publishing, digital scholarship, and copyright. My undergraduate background is in Philosophy and Women, Gender, & Sexuality studies, and I enjoy utilizing my critical thinking skills and love of theory to inform and improve my library practice.

What led you to your field?

It was actually a complete accident! After graduating from undergrad, I found myself interviewing for a temporary Administrative Assistant position at the college library. I had never considered working in a library before, but I quickly realized that many of my skills and interests are compatible with library work. I especially enjoyed the service-oriented nature of libraries and the desire to improve communities. My interest in social justice was welcomed in my position and it wasn’t long before I realized that I may have found my career path!

What are your research interests?

I’m developing an interest in the ways in which technology impacts our ability to seek and evaluation information, particularly in the context of algorithmic bias and surveillance capitalism. I am currently involved in organizing a reading group about artificial intelligence and information seeking behavior, and it is helping expand my conception of how libraries can serve their communities. I think libraries can have an even more prevalent role in educating students and others about the ways in which platforms like Google manipulate what we see online, and I’m looking forward to continue to investigate this topic.

What are some of your favorite underutilized Scholarly Commons resources that you would recommend?

Our Ask a Librarian chat service! The Scholarly Commons is on chat from 10am-2pm Monday-Friday every week and we are available to answer your questions. Feel free to write us about data analysis support, GIS needs, copyright, software, and more!

When you graduate, what would your ideal job position look like?

I’m starting to see the position of Student Success Librarian pop up, and I love the idea of having a job like that. Everything I do in the library always seems to come back to my interest in teaching students and working to make sure all students have the opportunity to succeed, particularly students who traditionally have been excluded from library support and services.

 

Simple NetInt: A New Data Visualization Tool from Illinois Assistant Professor, Juan Salamanca

Juan Salamanca Ph.D, Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently created a new data visualization tool called Simple NetInt. Though developed from a tool he created a few years ago, this tool brings entirely new opportunities to digital scholarship! This week we had the chance to talk to Juan about this new tool in data visualization. Here’s what he said…

Simple NetInt is a JavaScript version of NetInt, a Java-based node-link visualization prototype designed to support the visual discovery of patterns across large dataset by displaying disjoint clusters of vertices that could be filtered, zoomed in or drilled down interactively. The visualization strategy used in Simple NetInt is to place clustered nodes in independent 3D spaces and draw links between nodes across multiple spaces. The result is a simple graphic user interface that enables visual depth as an intuitive dimension for data exploration.

Simple NetInt InterfaceCheck out the Simple NetInt tool here!

In collaboration with Professor Eric Benson, Salamanca tested a prototype of Simple NetInt with a dataset about academic publications, episodes, and story locations of the Sci-Fi TV series Firefly. The tool shows a network of research relationships between these three sets of entities similar to a citation map but on a timeline following the episodes chronology.

What inspired you to create this new tool?

This tool is an extension of a prototype I built five years ago for the visualization of financial transactions between bank clients. It is a software to visualize networks based on the representation of entities and their relationships and nodes and edges. This new version is used for the visualization of a totally different dataset:  scholarly work published in papers, episodes of a TV Series, and the narrative of the series itself. So, the network representation portrays relationships between journal articles, episode scripts, and fictional characters. I am also using it to design a large mural for the Siebel Center for Design.

What are your hopes for the future use of this project?

The final goal of this project is to develop an augmented reality visualization of networks to be used in the field of digital humanities. This proof of concept shows that scholars in the humanities come across datasets with different dimensional systems that might not be compatible across them. For instance, a timeline of scholarly publications may encompass 10 or 15 years, but the content of what is been discussed in that body of work may encompass centuries of history. Therefore, these two different temporal dimensions need to be represented in such a way that helps scholars in their interpretations. I believe that an immersive visualization may drive new questions for researchers or convey new findings to the public.

What were the major challenges that came with creating this tool?

The major challenge was to find a way to represent three different systems of coordinates in the same space. The tool has a universal space that contains relative subspaces for each dataset loaded. So, the nodes instantiated from each dataset are positioned in their own coordinate system, which could be a timeline, a position relative to a map, or just clusters by proximities. But the edges that connect nodes jump from one coordinate system to the other. This creates the idea of a system of nested spaces that works well with few subspaces, but I am still figuring out what is the most intuitive way to navigate larger multidimensional spaces.

What are your own research interests and how does this project support those?

My research focuses on understanding how designed artifacts affect the viscosity of social action. What I do is to investigate how the design of artifacts facilitates or hinders the cooperation of collaboration between people. I use visual analytics methods to conduct my research so the analysis of networks is an essential tool. I have built several custom-made tools for the observation of the interaction between people and things, and this is one of them.

If you would like to learn more about Simple NetInt you can find contact information for Professor Juan Salamanca here and more information on his research!

If you’re interested in learning more about data visualizations for your own projects, check out our guide on visualizing your data, attend a Savvy Researcher Workshop, Live Chat with us on Ask a Librarian, or send us an email. We are always happy to help!

An interview with Billy Tringali on JAMS and Open Access

This week I had the opportunity to talk to Billy Tringali. If you don’t know Billy he worked in the Scholarly Commons as a graduate assistant from 2016-2018 and now works as a Law Librarian for Outreach at Emory University. Our conversation this week was about a passion project that he started during his time here at Illinois. Billy is the founding editor-in-chief of a brand new open access journal, The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS). The first volume of JAMS came out recently so be sure to go take a look!

"JAMS" with orange book icon and a dark gray background

How does JAMS fit into a broader scholarly conversation? What gaps in scholarship are you addressing with this journal?

JAMS is currently the only open-access journal solely dedicated to publishing scholarly articles on anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms. While there are other journals which publish works about anime, like the incredible Mechademia, they are not open-access. Anime and manga studies is such a diverse field, and there is a lot out there being published. The goal of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies is to provide a space for academics, students, and independent researchers examining the field of anime, manga, cosplay, and fandom studies to access high-quality research about these topics and share their research with others.

Tell us about your experience working with the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN). What advice do you have for scholars interested in using this resource?
Working with IOPN has been a dream. Such a qualified, helpful, and truly brilliant staff. If you want to use this resource (and why wouldn’t you?!) come prepared to work! JAMS went through a one-year long notes process before being accepted into IOPN, and they don’t publish low-quality work.
Did you always envision the journal as open access? Why or why not?
There was no point in time in which JAMS wasn’t going to be open-access. While I was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I had more than 14 million items at my fingertips. It was amazing. So much knowledge just a click away. In my coursework I learned how imperative information access is to scholarship, and I could only imagine how difficult it must be for scholars at smaller universities and outside the academe to find peer-reviewed research on this subject. JAMS aims to be part of that solution by publishing work that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere.
What unique challenges do you encounter as a new open access journal that you were not expecting?
The truly worst (and also funniest, looking back) was the professor who doubled-over in laughter when I told them I was trying to start up an open-access journal about anime and manga. But for every person that scoffed at JAMS, there was another who was so interested and excited to see this project succeed. A wonderful lesson to learn as a young scholar was to persevere!
What are the advantages for scholars who publish their work under a creative commons license?
Publishing under a Creative Commons license allows your work to be seen by everyone. It’s as simple as that. Do you want people to see what you’ve made? Then a Creative Commons license is a great choice!
I know Anime and Manga studies is a small area for academic research in the United States. How has this impacted the peer review process? 
It’s actually not all that small! There are a wide variety of researchers doing work on anime and manga studies, they just all happen to be spread out among a number of fields! We have peer reviewers from a diverse set of backgrounds – from education, to information science, to fandom studies – who are all so passionate about anime and manga studies. Our peer reviewers do an incredible job strengthening the papers submitted to JAMS, and I am incredibly grateful for their willingness to dedicate time to this journal.
What are your hopes for the future of this publication? 
(Combining this the question that was above)
I mention this in my “Welcome from the Editor-in-Chief”, and I think I said it best there:
“I hope the Journal of Anime and Manga Studiescan exist as a space that publishes high-quality scholarship about anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms. I hope that JAMS can bring visibility to the deeper meanings, understandings, and cultural significance of anime, manga, cosplay, and their fandoms. I hope that, in making JAMS open-access scholarship about anime and manga can be accessible to everyone, regardless of university affiliation. As Aramata Hiroshi and the Kyoto International Museum of Manga imbued a burning desire in me, I hope that the papers you will read in this journal imbue the same sense in you to do all you can for this fantastic art form.”

Our Graduate Assistants: Abigail Sewall

This interview is part of a continued series introducing our graduate assistants to our online community. These are some of the people you will see when you visit our space, who will greet you with a smile and a willingness to help! Say hello to Abigail Sewall!

What is your background education and work experience?

Before coming to graduate school, I was working as an administrator in standardized testing for a few years. I am a fountain of useless knowledge on most national standardized tests such as the GRE, SAT, and LSAT. The aspect of my job that I liked the most was talking to people and guiding them through what was inevitably one of the most stressful days of their life. I feel like the unique customer service environment of that job oddly enough prepared me well for working at a reference desk, especially during those stressful times of the semester where people are in panic mode. Before I worked in standardized testing I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder in Spanish Literature and Political Science. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis in comparative politics on trust in the police in Latin American countries. Through this process I had to learn to do large scale data analysis using a large public opinion survey database. It was a challenging project but I got a lot of help from the library.

What led you to your field?

My love of libraries developed as an undergraduate. I loved working on research projects because it gave me an opportunity to talk to one of the librarians, explore the collections, and discover the seemingly endless resources available in the library. The library really enriched my academic experience in such a profound way I wanted to be able to share that experience with others and help make the magic happen. Librarianship is a great intersection of my interests because it is both an intellectually challenging field and performs a valuable service to the community.

What are your research interests?

Where to begin? I am currently really interested in Twitter data literacy. I use Twitter every day and I find it to be a rich source of political and social discourse. I like to see how text data extracted from the popular micro blogging platform is used to address a variety of research questions. I’ve done some research on institutional archiving of Twitter data, which allowed me to consider some of the ethical and cultural implications of collecting and storing social media data. I am now working on learning how to scrape data from Twitter using Python. Experimenting with Python has been interesting because I don’t come from a technical background but I am finding I make slow but sure progress with it. I am excited to see where it takes me and I may even try building my own Twitter database.

What are your favorite projects you’ve worked on?

One of my favorite projects I’ve worked on as a Scholarly Commons GA was developing resources for using US Census data for students and researchers. In the process of making our LibGuide on the Census I learned a lot about the census questionnaire and how researchers use census data. It was also a lot of fun to help my supervisor with the US Census workshop because I love instruction and it was a great opportunity to show my expertise.

What are some of your favorite underutilized Scholarly Commons resources that you would recommend?

Our LibGuides! We have dozens of guides on a variety of subjects such as software tutorials, data discovery, digital humanities, and more. Each guide has been thoughtfully assembled by one of our librarians or GAs and contain links to resources, advice, and information to suit all of your research technology needs. I taught myself how to use SPSS using our SPSS tutorial LibGuide and would highly recommend it to anyone! Check out all of our guides on our webpage!

What is the one thing you would want people to know about your field?

I think it is important for people to recognize that libraries are always a reflection of the community they serve. All the services we offer at the Scholarly Commons address a specific need of the scholars and students at our university. We provide a space for collaborative work, software and technology available no where else on campus, and instruction to supplement the resources in our unit. I hope in my career that I will be able to continue to serve the needs of my community, whatever they may be.

 

It Takes a Campus – Episode Two with Harriett Green

Image has the text supporting digital scholarship, it takes a campus with icons of microphone and broadcast symbol

 

 

Resources mentioned:

SPEC Kit No. 357

University of Illinois Library Copyright Guide

 

For the transcript, click on “Continue reading” below.

Continue reading

Our Graduate Assistants: Xena Becker

This interview is part of a series introducing our graduate assistants to our online community. These are some of the people you will see when you visit our space, who will greet you with a smile and a willingness to help! Say hello to Xena Becker!

A headshot of Xena Becker, a fair skinned woman with long dark hair wearing a green and blue scarf

What is your background education and work experience?
I graduated from New York University with a major in Comparative Literature and a minor in Global and Urban Education Studies. My focus in Comparative Literature was Archives and Library Science, which I personally tailored from classes available in the English, Comparative Literature, and Media, Culture, and Communications departments. Most of my work experience is in education; for a long time, I kept accidentally getting teaching jobs. I really enjoy teaching, though, and my experience as an educator ranges from theater to writing. When I was a junior, I started working in the special collections library at NYU and I have been working in libraries ever since. Now, at the University of Illinois, I work in the Scholarly Commons and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which is a really good balance for all of my interests.

What led you to your field?
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a class titled Papyrus to PDF: An Introduction to Book History Now. That class was my first introduction to special collections and archives and I was completely hooked. It was taught by an English professor and a rare books librarian in the special collections classroom and focused on the history of books as physical objects, rather than just as pieces of writing. The content of the class got me to pay attention, but the intricacies I was exposed to of the operation of special collections libraries was what made the class so memorable. I knew I wanted to be involved in stewarding and making available texts and materials to researchers and students, and what better place to do that than a library?

Additionally, though, I want to acknowledge that I was invited to enter librarianship by other librarians. My professor for Papyrus to PDF saw that I was interested in libraries and invited me to apply to work for her the next summer; in research consultations with subject librarians I would ask how they became interested in library science. Everyone was very open and encouraging to my questions and interests, which was another defining aspect of what led me to librarianship.

What are your research interests?
I am interested in expanding learning opportunities in archives and special collections—this means both increasing instruction education for library staff and making library spaces and materials more accessible for learners of all backgrounds. Within special collections I’m a little more open with my interests—I am one of many special collections librarians who refer to themselves as “generalists.” I try to keep my interests as open as possible, but I have done some more specific research on queer archival history, special collections instruction, and data visualization.

What are your favorite projects you’ve worked on?
I have enjoyed collaborating with our Data Analytics and Visualization Resident Librarian, Megan Ozeran, on projects that cover all areas of data visualization. Before working with Megan on data visualization projects, I had never really considered academic librarianship as a career that utilizes creative and artistic expression or builds on visual forms of communication—I thought it was all about text. However, learning about data visualization quickly changed my perspective on this and introduced me to a whole new area of skills to learn. Some of the things I have done with Megan include writing monthly blog posts, Exploring Data Visualization, that showcase interesting data viz examples from around the web. Another project was creating posters of historical data visualizations to display at our Data Visualization Competition. That project was a great opportunity to bridge my roles at the Scholarly Commons and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library to show off the cool historic data visualizations out there.

What are some of your favorite underutilized resources that you would recommend?
Our creative software! We have access to the full Adobe Creative Suite in the Scholarly Commons as well as some open source alternatives, and I love toying around with them and figuring out what we can do to make this software useful for our patrons.

When you graduate, what would your ideal job position look like?
My ideal position would be working in a special collections library doing instruction and outreach. I want to continue sharing what I’ve learned about libraries and collections with as many people as possible through classes, exhibits, social media, and other creative forms of outreach. I love working with the public either at a reference desk or through events and classes, so I want to work somewhere that focuses on bringing people and collections together. I would love to keep working at a college or university, but I’m open to working somewhere like a museum or public library as well. Finally, I’d love to work somewhere that has collections that cover areas that interest me or focus on representing diverse voices.

What is the one thing you would want people to know about your field?
That librarianship can look like so many different things—there’s no one way to be a librarian. Many people who work in libraries don’t consider themselves librarians, and many people who should be considered librarians aren’t. Working in libraries has taught me that I will always be able to learn new skills or try new things, all of which can still be librarianship!

Meet Dan Tracy, Information Sciences and Digital Humanities Librarian

This latest installment of our series of interviews with Scholarly Commons experts and affiliates features Dan Tracy, Information Sciences and Digital Humanities Librarian.


What is your background and work experience?

I originally come from a humanities background and completed a PhD in literature specializing in 20th century American literature, followed by teaching as a lecturer for two years. I had worked a lot with librarians during that time with my research and teaching. When you’re a PhD student in English, you teach a lot of rhetoric, and I also taught some literature classes. As a rhetoric instructor I worked closely with the Undergraduate Library’s instruction services, which exposed me to the work librarians do with instruction.

Then I did a Master’s in Library and Information Science here, knowing that I was interested in being an academic librarian, probably something in the area of being a subject librarian in the humanities. And then I began this job about five years ago. So I’ve been here about five years now in this role. And just began doing Digital Humanities over the summer. I had previously done some liaison work related to digital humanities, especially related to digital publishing, and I had been doing some research related to user experience and digital publishing as related to DH publishing tools.

What led you to this field?

A number of things. One was having known quite a number of people who went into librarianship who really liked it and talked about their work. Another was my experience working with librarians in terms of their instruction capacity. I was interested in working in an academic environment and I was interested in academic librarianship and teaching. And also, especially as things evolved, after I went back for the degree in library and information science, I also found a lot of other things to be interested in as well, including things like digital humanities and data issues.

What is your research agenda?

My research looks at user experience in digital publishing. Primarily in the context of both ebook formats and newer experimental forms of publication such as web and multi-modal publishing with tools like Scalar, especially from the reader side, but also from the creator side of these platforms.

Do you have any favorite work-related duties?

As I mentioned before, instruction was an initial draw to librarianship. I like anytime I can teach and work with students, or faculty for that matter, and help them learn new things. That would probably be a top thing. And I think increasingly the chances I get to work with digital collections issues as well. I think there’s a lot of exciting work to do there in terms of delivering our digital collections to scholars to complete both traditional and new forms of research projects.

What are some of your favorite underutilized resources that you would recommend to researchers?

I think there’s a lot. I think researchers are already aware of digital primary sources in general, but I do think there’s a lot more for people to explore in terms of collections we’ve digitized and things we can do with those through our digital library, and through other digital library platforms, like DPLA (Digital Public Library of America).

I think that a lot of our digital image collections are especially underutilized. I think people are more aware that we have digitized text sources, but not aware of our digitized primary sources that are images that have value of research objects, including analyzed computational analysis. We also have more and more access to the text data behind our various vendor platforms, which is a resource various researchers on campus increasingly need but don’t always know is available.

If you could recommend one book to beginning researchers in your field, what would you recommend?

If you’re just getting started, I think a good place to look is at the Debates in the Digital Humanities books, which are collections of essays that touch on a variety of critical issues in digital humanities research and teaching. This is a good place to start if you want to get a taste of the ongoing debates and issues. There are open access copies of them available online, so they are easy to get to.

Dan Tracy can be reached at dtracy@illinois.edu.