2023 Practicum Project Titles - SILS Scholar Showcase 2023

James Cates Archival Research Project

Doss Hill, Rachael Brittain, Amanda Breeden, Molly Dignam, Zoey Ralston, Mary Tibbits, and Olivia Reich

Sponsored by: Dr. Megan Winget, Teaching Assistant Professor for SILS and Danita Mason-Hogans, President of Bridging the Gap

After working with Wilson Library’s special collections and beyond, we collected records surrounding the murder of James Cates on UNC’s campus and organized them into a research guide, including oral histories, scans of archival materials, and newspaper articles.

Phyllis Stevens Personal Archive

Josh Kutac, Emma Hauck, and Chris Koester

Sponsored by: Dr. Denise Anthony, UNC SILS and Dr. Elliot Kueker, Teaching Assistant Professor for SILS

This project catalogs on an item level the personal and professional materials related to Phyllis Stevens and her 60-year career as a visual artist.

Archiving the Art of Phyllis Stevens

Cade Carlson, Sean Rogers, Reid Dickie, Margaret Steitz, and Stacey Fox

Sponsored by: Dr. Denise Anthony, UNC SILS and Dr. Elliot Kueker, Teaching Assistant Professor for SILS

This archive project consisted of photographing artworks in the studio and recording their metadata with an accession number in an excel sheet.

Digital Wellness App

Brianna Thompson, Joe Oh, Elizabeth Ranatza, Jolie Tingen, and Ola Bamgbade

Sponsored by: Fred Stutzman, Founder and CEO of Freedom

Our interactions with technology have been proven to be unhealthy and reduce the quality of life for most users if not regulated. The goal of the Digital Wellness App Practicum group was to build a prototype for a mobile app for UNC students that creates a more holistic approach to digital wellness by growing skills in the following areas: reflection, mindfulness meditation, focus, and sleep.

Duke University Libraries: Web Analytics Pilot

Patrick Conway, Delia Wegner, Chance Foley, Wesley Leonhardt, and Sam Dalsheimer

Sponsored by: Sean Aery, Digital Projects Developer at Duke University Libraries

Our team worked with the Assessment and User Experience Strategy team at Duke University Libraries (DUL) to run a pilot test of Matomo, an open-source alternative to Google Analytics. The purpose was to evaluate the feasibility of decoupling from the Google ecosystem to better meet their organizational values and commitments to user privacy. Through a collaborative and agile process, we implemented Matomo on DUL servers, tested technical processes on high- and low-traffic sites, engaged stakeholders, and provided a series of recommendations on how to best transition all 110 DUL websites to Matomo.

On the Books / In the Community

Team Members: Tatiana Hargreaves, Gabriela Santana, Shaina Leverett

Sponsored by: Dr. Megan Winget, Teaching Assistant Professor for SILS and Danita Mason-Hogans, President of Bridging the Gap

This is a project for the James Cates Scholars program for the Bridging the Gap organization in which we created a website, a guidebook to conducting oral history interviews and other outreach materials. The scholars will be conducting oral histories with community elders over the summer and using the website as a digital repository.

Graphic Novel Diversity Audit

Amy Vincent, Heather Donnelly, Mya McCoy, Maggie O’Sullivan, and Press Browne

Sponsored by: Rebecca Vargha, UNC SILS Librarian and Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Professor for SILS

Over the course of the ’22-’23 academic school year we performed a diversity audit of the School of Information and Library Science library’s graphic novel collection in order to assess the collection and make purchase recommendations.

University Engagement Measures and Metrics

Chul Yeun Park, Ian Elliott, and Advaith Deo

Sponsored by: Cynthia Reifsnider, Director of Data and Partnership Strategy, Office of Innovate Carolina

Innovate Carolina is expanding its support for startups by creating a coworking space in Chapel Hill. A place for many events and venture attractions, it needs the right measures and metrics to capture the success of its efforts.

Artificial Intelligence Art Production

Zhaohui Wang, Yuang Yang, Jiaxin Yang, Yixuan Cheng, and Haoyu Xin

Sponsored by: Dr. Megan Winget, Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC SILS

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has paved the way for the creation of exquisite artwork through AI-generated images. As a result, the market has witnessed a surge in the emergence of numerous AI-powered image-generation platforms. In our research, our group meticulously explored multiple Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), starting from their basic implementations and gradually delving deeper into specific functionalities. Furthermore, we investigated the application of the Stable Diffusion method within the field of AI-generated art. We conducted a comparative analysis between the Stable Diffusion method and the GANs approach, assessing their respective strengths, weaknesses, and suitability for various artistic applications.

Data Mining Techniques to Stock Analysis: Based on NLP of Chinese News

Hanzhong Ye, Jiamu Ding, Hao Liang, Shuang Du

Sponsored by: Dr. Mustafa Gultekin, Clinical Associate Professor of Finance at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

We used AWS RDS Free Tier to run SQL Server and asyncio crawlers to collect over 400,000 financial news data. The objective of our project was to use FinBERT, a state-of-the-art language model, to predict price movements based on the collected news data.

Durham School of the Arts Diversity Audit X

Brianne Estes, Katie Jones, Morrigan Smith, Caroline Vaverek, Sarah Yarborough

Sponsored by: Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Professor at UNC SILS and Kimberly Fawks-Gugino, Teacher-Librarian at DSA

This project was a diversity audit of the Durham School of the Arts library’s fiction collection.

T2T Marketplace Website

Ziqiao Ma, Yiran Chen, and Zhidi Zhang

Sponsored by: Antoine de Torcy, Software Engineer at UNC SILS

Our objective is to design and implement a cutting-edge, reliable online platform tailored to the unique needs of the University of North Carolina campus community, with a focus on creating a safe and intuitive user experience for second-hand shopping.

BelongIn.app – A Social Connection Web App Built with Bubble

Denise Stroud, Irena Brain, Vamsy Marni, Xinmeng Sun, Tian Qiu

Sponsored by: Antoine de Torcy, Software Engineer at UNC SILS

BelongIn.app is a web app intended to help bring people together in the physical world and to connect various activity groups through shared interests, using Bubble, a no-code app builder.

Interactive Real-time Satellite Tracking Dashboard

Chao Yuan, Tianyi Wang, Yan Tang, Zihan He

Sponsored by: Henry Huang, Software Engineer at Microsoft

This project aims to serve satellite lovers, Starlink fans, geological researchers, scholars of earth and space, climatologists, and young students interested in science. Although the Starlink official website provides a search for Starlink service availability, but for users who are curious about Starlink satellites and their orbits, or their movements, there’s no place to get such information from the Starlink website. So, our team is eager to learn about the path of movement of the Starlink satellites, their coverage, and the operation pattern in a visualized form.

Juggling Pineapples: Expanding and Improving SILS’s Student Symposium

Deirdre McLeod and Darvin Heo

Sponsored by: Dr. Francesca Tripodi, Assistant Professor at UNC SILS

As planners of the 6th annual Symposium on Information for Social Good, we handled an influx of presenters due to new curriculum requirements. This poster chronicles our experiences with expanding and improving a SILS tradition while juggling the need for a focused mission, improved information access, consolidated documentation, clear communication, and flexibility.

Graduate Student Tracking System

Ruihan Chen, Xiaohan Yu, Zixin Li, Ivan Yang

Sponsored by: Dr. Brian Sturm, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor at UNC SILS

Our project was to design a tracking system web app for master’s degree students that includes tracking for required courses, bin requirements, specializations, and capstones.

Text Corpora Construction and Mining for Systematic Reviews in Environmental Science

Xuhesheng Chen, Yuxin Ding, Pengxuan Wang, Qian Yu

Sponsored by: Dr. Ray Wang, Assistant Professor at UNC SILS

Our project utilizes data mining techniques to extract and analyze papers that are about air pollution and are selected in ISA literature, providing us insights to support the development of effective environmental policies.

UNC International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) Redesign

Phillip Chen, Lawrence Liu, Jiaqing Pan, Vernnica Tseng