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Research Groups

GSLIS faculty and students collaborate in a number of different research groups:

• Community Inquiry Research Group
  Focuses on research, especially around learning (in communities, schools, libraries, museums, online, and other settings). Discussions explore issues of problem formulation, theory, methodology, analysis, interpretation, writing, and application. The group provides opportunities to share and critique work in progress, to discuss research methods or new ideas, or to talk about any sorts of issues related to completing a PhD.
• Eclectic Design Research Group (EDRG)
  The Eclectic Design Research Group (EDRG) is a multidisciplinary group headed by Professor Michael Twidale that researches design and design methods by "selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles," and combining them to create new and more powerful methods. We do not believe in picking a single doctrine, field, method, approach, style, etc. Rather, we are constantly exploring new ideas, new methods, and new approaches to design, and always welcome new types of design projects. One common theme of the group is our interest in design. Another common theme of the group is our interest in rapid, iterative methods. A third theme is our focus on what people actually do. Thus rapid prototyping and evaluation, scenario-based design, participatory design, etc., are all topics which we recurringly address. The purpose is to try to understand the nature of design, and to develop principles of design that are robust across different applications. While we originally focused on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), EDRG has gradually broadened its scope to include areas such as knowledge management (KM), human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-mediated communication (CMC), social informatics (SI), and sociotechnical systems, and bioinformatics among others, and the disciplines and approaches we embrace is constantly expanding.
• Electronic Publishing Research Group
• E-research study group
• HUMIRS
• Language Evolution and Distributed Information Systems Study Group
  This study group/seminar covers mathematical, computational, experimental and empirical research at the intersection of language evolution and distributed information systems. Some central issues include: how artificial agents can create and adapt their own communication languages; models of human language emergence and change; symbol grounding; emergent web ontologies and "folksonomies"; population and network models of language dynamics; online consensus and agreement in very large spaces; emergence/evolution of signalling and communication in biological systems (molecular to population levels); language as a complex adaptive system; dynamic resource description/discovery systems and metadata; distributed information integration; etc. The study group is intended as a way for interested people in the UIUC community to participate and track work in this rapidly expanding area--the core UIUC group has been meeting steadily since 2003. The process is reading and presentation of research papers; a prior reading of each paper is generally assumed in the discussion.
• Math study group
• Metadata roundtable
• Social informatics reading group
• Research Forum
  Created to provide an opportunity for doctoral students and faculty to present on-going and in-progress research for discussion and feed back. The forums are very informal and all members of the GSLIS community are welcome to attend and to take part in the discussion. Meetings are held monthly, with details about time, date, and room published on the GSLIS calendar.
• Research Writing Group
  Meets weekly to offer constructive feedback and criticism on a writing project, such as an article for publication, or a research proposal description. All GSLIS faculty, staff, and students are invited to participate, and to contribute papers for discussion. Papers can be at any stage, from outline to nearly finished draft.
• Storytelling Guild
• Youth Literature Interest Group
  The Youth Literature Interest Group (YLIG) explores issues of lifelong literacy through interdisciplinary research on texts, contexts, and aesthetics in literature for youth. Hosted by the Center for Children's Books, the group draws from faculty and doctoral students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, the College of Education, the Department of English, and American Indian Studies on the UIUC campus, as well as from Illinois State University and Eastern Illinois University. In addition to monthly discussions and presentations, the group sponsors an YLIG Research Showcase in the fall led by rotating members of the group and an annual Gryphon Lecture in the spring by a leading scholar in the field (Perry Nodelman, 2005; Rudine Sims Bishop, 2006; Roger Sutton, scheduled for 2007). In October 2006, YLIG will sponsor an Allerton Conference on the subject of “Family, Youth, and Literature,” and two members will also be involved in hosting a conference in March 2007, to launch a web site and book entitled “A Narrative Compass: Women's Scholarly Journeys,” an idea that originated with our first YLIG Research Showcase. By creatively connecting literary critics and education researchers to form a dynamic community focused on youth literature, YLIG has national impact on the future of reading and readers. Contact "Betsy Hearne"-ehearne, at uiuc.edu- or "Christine Jenkins"-cajenkin, at uiuc.edu- for more information.