CCI Professor Il-Yeol Song has received the DKE Best Paper Award for his 2017 paper, “Big data technologies and management: What conceptual modeling can do.”
The Elsevier journal best paper announcement is available here.
Category: News & Events
Xintong Zhao Presents at ACM/IEEE JCDL 2020 Workshop
On August 5th, Xintong Zhao, CCI/Drexel University, doctoral student and MRC research assistant (RA), presented her research at the ACM/JCDL 2020 (Association of Computing Machinery/Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) workshop, “Organizing Big Data, Information, and Knowledge.”

Zhao’s presentation, “Scholarly Big Data: Computational Approaches to Semantic Labeling in Materials Science,” is from research she is conducting in collaboration with team members: the NSF supported Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) initiative, Accelerating the Discovery of Electronic Materials through Human-Computer Active Search. Zhao’s research examines computation and semantic labeling for scholarly big data in materials science. She reported on a baseline comparative analysis she led, comparing the ontology-based automatic indexing with the Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE-4-MAT) application and the MATScholar system, which uses named entity recognition (NER), supported by an RNN (Recursive Neural Network). [presentation slides]
Webinar: Computational Archival Science: A Paradigm Shift Across the Data
What: Computational Archival Science: A Paradigm Shift Across the Data [Virtual]
When: July 6 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT, 12:00-1:30 PM EDT
Participation: free/open to all
Registration required for ZOOM link; register @: link
The Emerging Technologies, Big Data & Archives series and the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) will co-host a webinar on computing the archives, led by Richard Marciano (AICollaboratory, University of Maryland) and Jane Greenberg (Metadata Research Center, Drexel University). The session will cover graduate student datathon participation, using the Legacy of Slavery data from Maryland State Archives; and AI/machine learning applied to the WWII FDR Presidential Library diaries. The session will also highlight the connection to Drexel’s LEADS program.
Graduate students include:
- Rajesh Gnanasekaran (UMD)
- Alexis Hill: (UMD)
- Phillip Nicholas (UMD)
- Lori Perine (UMD)
- Sonia Pascua (Drexel, 2019 LEADS Fellow)
- Hanlin Zhang (UNC, 2019 LEADS Fellow)
The webinar is co-sponsored by CLIR, and co–hosted by Oklahoma State University Emerging Technologies & Creativity Research Lab, and led by postdoctoral fellows Rebecca Y. Bayeck, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture & Azure Stewart, New York University, as part of “CLIR’s Emerging Technologies, Big Data & Archives” series.
Metadata Mixer: Quarantine Catch-Up
On Thursday, June 11th, the Metadata Research Center hosted a “Metadata Mixer: Quarantine Catch-Up.” Participants shared presentations about their research and work accomplishments over the Spring term, as well as goals for the summer. Available presentation slides can be viewed below.
Presenters:
- Sam Grabus: Historical subject representation & the “Long S” [Slides]
- Winner: Winner: 2020 Lita/Ex Libris Student Writing Award [ALA Press Release]
- Vishal Deo/Prateek Goel: Exploratory Analysis on DataSar [Slides]
- Steve Dilliplane: Nature from Afar
- Jeremy Leipzig: Dichotomous Keys [Slides]
- Xintong Zhao: Accelerating Materials Discovery Using Information Extraction [Slides]
MRC’s Sam Grabus wins 2020 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award
Information Science Doctoral Candidate Sam Grabus was awarded the 2020 LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award for her paper, “Evaluating the Impact of the Long S upon 18th-Century Encyclopedia Britannica Automatic Subject Metadata Generation Results.” The paper reports on a comparative study of subject metadata generated both before and after the correction of the historical Long S in the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The HIVE tool was used to automatically generate the subject metadata. Descriptive statistics were applied, and visualizations produced from the results were also examined to identify trends related to encyclopedia entry length.
The paper will be published in the September issue of LITA’s Open Access peer-reviewed journal, Information Technology and Libraries. Read more in the American Library Association Press Release.
LOVE Data Week Metadata Mixer: Dr. Chaomei Chen

The Metadata Research Center will host its first Metadata Mixer of 2020 on Tuesday February 11th, in Celebration of Love Data Week.
Date: Tuesday, February 11th
Time: 12-1pm
Location: 3675 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA
Room: 10th floor, room 1056
Presenters: Dr. Chaomei Chen, CCI
Topic: CiteSpace: Research Metrics and Analytics
Abstract: CiteSpace is a visual analytic and science mapping tool for visualizing various trends and patterns in the literature of scholarly publications across a wide range of research disciplines. CiteSpace is designed to produce interactive visualizations of various networks and facilitate systematic scientometric reviews. I will introduce the key concepts and theories behind CiteSpace with exemplars of studies enabled by CiteSpace and demonstrate the core workflows of working with CiteSpace.
* CiteSpace is a freely available Java application:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/citespace/
LEADS-4-NDP Forum
On Friday, January 24th, the Metadata Research Center and Drexel CCI hosted the LEADS Forum, a full-day workshop to celebrate the research outputs from two years of LEADS data science fellows, and hear from advisory board members, mentors, early-to-mid-career professionals, and special guests from OCLC and the Library of Congress.
Continue reading “LEADS-4-NDP Forum”MRC Celebrating Data Science and Libraries
The Metadata Research Center and Drexel CCI are hosting two events in January to celebrate data science and libraries. Both events are free and open to the public. Space for these events is limited, so register soon!


1) Data Science Foundations Carpentry:
What: Data Science Foundations Carpentry
Date: January 23rd, 2020
Time: 8am-4:30pm
Location:
Hagerty Library
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia ,PA
Room: L33
Registration: Link
Event Page: View Here
The workshop will cover:
- GitHub basics
- OpenRefine
- APIs
- Best data practices
- Jargon-busting
2) LEADS-4-NDP Forum:
What: LEADS-4-NDP Forum
Date: January 24th, 2020
Time: Coffee & registration: 8:30-9:30am Forum: 9:30am – 3pm
Location: 3675 Market St,
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA
Room: Quorum, floor 2, Room Qu4b
Forum agenda: PDF
Registration: Link
Event Page: View Here
The Forum will celebrate the success of LEADS and chart the way forward for continuing this program with doctoral students and early to mid-career front line information professionals.
Metadata Research Center: Data Science Foundations Carpentry
The Metadata Research Center is hosting a Data Science Foundations Carpentry on January 23rd, 2020 at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics.
Date: January 23rd, 2020
Time: 8am-4:30pm
Location: 3675 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA
Room: TBA
Registration Link: https://tinyurl.com/wevaeju
Event Page: View Here
The workshop will cover:
- GitHub basics
- OpenRefine
- APIs
- Best data practices
- Jargon-busting
The full carpentry abstract is provided below.
Continue reading “Metadata Research Center: Data Science Foundations Carpentry”LEADS Fellows Participate in DCIC Datathon
LEADS-4-NDP fellows Sonia Pascua, Rongqian Ma, and Hanlin Zhang participated in a Datathon hosted by the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation Innovation Center, which took place at the Maryland State Archives from October 28-29th.

