CURRICULUM VITAE
Elizabeth Figa, Ph.D.
School of Library and Information Sciences
University of North Texas
P.O. Box 311068
Denton, TX 76203-1068
Email:
Telephone: 940-565-2187
Fax: 940-565-3101
ACADEMIC PREPARATION
Degree Major Institution
Ph.D. Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
M.S. Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
M.S. Community Health Education Illinois State University
B.S. Nursing DePauw University
SCHOLARLY AND PROFESSIONAL RESEARCH GROUPS
Fellow, Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, University of North Texas
Member, University of North Texas Digital Storytelling Project
Member, University of North Texas Center for Research on Language and Information Technologies
Research Methods Umbrella
· Ethnographic Study of Information Retrieval and Information Behavior
· Ethnographic Study of Storytelling and the Oral Tradition
· Narrative and Content Analysis
· Historical Research Methods
Subject Interests
· Storytelling as Information Science
o Storytelling Pedagogy
o Digital Storytelling / Virtual Storytelling Environments
· Virtual Personalities / Online Persona and Language and Information Technologies
· Multimedia Development / Applications for Use in Pedagogy
· Online Pedagogy, Distance Education, E-Learning, and Online Teaching-Learning Systems
· Library Services for Distance Education and E-Learning
· Doctoral Education in Library and Information Science
· Youth Information Seeking Behavior and Youth Services Librarianship
· Library and Information Science History and Culture
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
Assistant Professor. School of Library and Information Sciences. University of North Texas.
2002-Present. Appointed as a teaching and research member of the faculty. Areas of teaching include information access and retrieval and youth librarianship.
Instructor. School of Library and Information Sciences. University of North Texas.
2000-2002. Appointed as a teaching and research member of the faculty. Areas of teaching include information access and retrieval and youth librarianship.
Assistant to the Dean. Graduate College. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
1996-2000.
Health Education Coordinator and Librarian. McKinley Health Center. University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1987-1996.
Public Health Nurse Educator. Illinois Public Health District. Urbana-Champaign. 1986-
1987.
Public Health Nurse II Consultant. Marion County Health Department. Indianapolis, Indiana.
1983-1986.
Staff Nurse Nursing Research Unit; Emergency Room. Methodist Hospital and Westview Hospital of Indianapolis, Indiana. 1977-1983.
EDITORIAL ROLE
Associate Editor, Storytelling, Self, and Society: Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., N.J.
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIP AND SERVICE
American Society for Information Science and Technology
Arts and Humanities Special Interest Group
History & Foundations of Information Science (HFIS) Special Interest Group
Association for Library and Information Science Education
Youth Services Special Interest Group
American Library Association
Professional Ethics Committee 2003 – 2005
Association for Library Service to Children
ALSC Legislative Committee 2004 - present
Young Adult Library Services Association
Reference and User Services Association
Library History Round Table
Public Library Association 2003-2005
National Storytelling Association
Executive Board Storytelling in Higher Education Special Interest Group
Planning Committee 2004 Conference: Storytelling Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary
Conference on Storytelling Studies. Webmaster Storytelling, Self, Society: An
Interdisciplinary Conference Website
Planning Committee, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Storytelling in Higher Education
Pre-Conference
Medical Library Association
Past Chair Oral History Committee 2004 – 2005
Chair Oral History Committee 2003 – 2004
Chair-Elect Oral History Committee 2002-2003
Texas Library Association
Councilor Storytelling Round Table 2003-present
Research and Scholarship Committee 2004 – present
2004 Conference Planning Committee
2004 Conference Sub-Committee on Unsolicited Speakers
2004 Conference Planning Committee Liaison to Tocker Foundation Committee
2004 Conference Planning Committee Liaison to Media and Related Technologies
Children’s Round Table 2006- present
Young Adult’s Round Table 2006- present
Reference Round Table 2006-present
Distributed E-Learning Interest Group 2007 – present
Texas Distance Learning Association
Tejas Storytelling Association
Digital Storytelling Association
Beta Phi Mu International Honorary
Phi Kappa Phi Interdisciplinary Honors Society
TIDSE (Technologies for Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) Conference 2003 Panel
Moderator
ORGANIZATIONAL SERVICE
University of North Texas
SACS Accreditation Review Committee, SLIS Representative, 2001 – 2003
Faculty Senate, 2004 – present
International Education Committee 2005 – present
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge, Fellow.
Interdisciplinary IS Ph.D. Program Advisory Committee Member, 2004 – present
Board member and Secretary, Phi Kappa Phi Interdisciplinary Honors Society University of North Texas Chapter 2002 – present
University of North Texas Community Award Committee, 2006-2007
University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences Service
Beta Phi Mu Scholastic Honorary – Faculty Advisor, 2003 – present
Student Affairs Committee, 2006 – present
ITKS Committee 2006 – present, appointed Chair 2007
Facilities and Resources Committee 2004 – 2006
COA Working Group on Standards for Facilities and Resources 2004 – 2006
COA Working Group on Standards for faculty Committee 2004 – 2006
Capstone Committee, 2002 – 2006
Personnel Affairs Committee 2002 – present
Curriculum Committee, Chair, 2001 – Spring 2003
Fieldwork Committee 2000 – 2002
Executive Committee 2000 – 2001; 2005 – 2006
Beta Phi Mu Selection Process Ad Hoc Task Force, 2007 – present
AWARDS & HONORS
University of North Texas Faculty Award For Excellence In Doctoral Mentoring,
Nominee, 2006.
University of North Texas Outstanding Online Teacher and Outstanding Online Course Award Recipient, 2005.
University of North Texas J. H. Shelton Excellence in Teaching Award, Nominee, 2003.
Phi Kappa Phi Interdisciplinary Honors Society, higher education honor society, initiated 2000.
UIUC Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence Award, Nominee, 1998, Finalist 1999, Finalist 2000.
Doctoral Dissertation Award, Beta Phi Mu International Honorary of Library and Information
Science, $2000, 1999.
National Science Foundation Sponsored Committee on Institutional Cooperation Women
in Science and Engineering Conference on Mentoring, Invited/funded, University of
Wisconsin- Madison, 1999.
Conference Travel Scholarship, American Oral History Association Graduate Student
Conference Travel award, $500, 1998.
National Science Foundation Sponsored Committee on Institutional Cooperation Women in Science and Engineering Conference on Pedagogical Innovations, Curricular Reforms and Classroom Climate, Invited/funded, Purdue University, 1997.
Health Sciences Information Management Award, University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, $500, 1996.
Beta Phi Mu, International Library and Information Science Honor Society initiated 1996.
University of Illinois Student Affairs Outstanding Staff Award, 1989.
GRANTS
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge Interdisciplinary Information Science Ph.D. Student/Faculty Research Grant Program. Awarded $3000 for proposal with doctoral student Eunkyung Chung for “A Scale Model to Measure the Interactivity of Virtual Storytelling”, 2004.
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge Research Assistant Fellowship Competition. Proposal competition for student recruitment; awarded a $16,000 teaching assistant fellowship to support a doctoral student Eunkyung Chung in 2004-2005.
ISDOC Mini-Grant: The Saga Of Online Teaching: The Precepts, Practices, Pleasures And Pitfalls Of Teaching Storytelling Via Web-Based Online Distance Courses – One Model with doctoral student Janet Macpherson, $1000, 2003.
University of North Texas Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant, the University of North Texas Digital Storytelling Project $5000, 2003.
University of North Texas TIF Grant, Storytelling the Future: The Development of a Web-Based Graduate Academic Certificate in Storytelling and a New Course in Advanced Storytelling Featuring Virtual Reality-Based Interactive Multimedia Technology, $15,000, 2002.
2002 TOCKER/VERIZON Scholarship Program Grants for Graduate Academic Certificate (GAC) in Youth Services: Grant funds for scholarships, personal computers and internet connectivity for 25 students to matriculate to the GAC in Youth Services. $94,000.
University of North Texas Teaching with Technology Grant, Web-based Course Development SLIS 5960 History and Ethnography Youth Information Services, $8958.42, 2002.
University of North Texas Teaching with Technology Grant, Web-based Course Development SLIS 5440 Youth Programs and Storytelling, $4775.00, 200.
Medical Library Association for Oral History Project with E. Jean Antes, 1997. $4000.
UIUC Student Affairs Challenge Grant Program and the Champaign-Urbana Century Coalition Grant for the Inner Voices Social Issues Theatre project, $1000.00, 1996.
University of Illinois FIPSE Project for the development of alcohol abuse prevention learning centers, $5000.00, 1992.
PUBLICATIONS
Dissertation
Figa, E. (1992). Mapping and storytelling an information system: An historical and ethnographic case study of the first rural circuit rider medical library. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1992). Dissertation Abstracts International, AAT 3070301.
Book Chapter
Figa, E. & Macpherson, J. (2004). Brown v. Board of Education and Its Effect on
Libraries and Library and Information Science Education. In M. B. Wheeler (Ed.), Unfinished Business: Race, Equity, and Diversity in Library and Information Science Education (pp. 3-41). Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Edited Book
Figa, E., Ed. (1999). Medical Library Association Oral History Committee Interview with
E. Jean Antes. E. Figa, Interviewer. Chicago, IL: Medical Library Association.
Journal Articles
Figa, E. The Emergent Properties of Multimedia Applications for Storytelling
Pedagogy in a Distance Education Online Learning Community. Storytelling, Self, Society: Interdisciplinary Journal on Storytelling Studies, 3(1) 2007, 50 – 72.
Radner, J., Sobol, J., Novak, D., Dietz, K., Timpanelli, G., & Lipman, D., with additional
comments from E. Figa, C. Roney, & Y. Wang. (2004). Visions for Storytelling Studies: A Forum. Storytelling, Self, Society: Interdisciplinary Journal on Storytelling Studies, 1(1) Summer 2004, 8 – 27.
Figa, E. & Tarau, P. (2002). The VISTA Architecture: Experiencing Stories through Virtual Storytelling Agents. ACM: SigGroup Bulletin, 23(2), 27-28.
Figa, E. (1999). Mapping Culture: Rural Circuit Medical Librarians' Medical Information Systems. Library Trends, 47(3), 349 – 374.
Magazine Articles
Figa, E. (2004). The Virtualization of Stories and Storytelling. Storytelling Magazine, 16(2), 34 - 36.
Conference Proceedings Research Publications (Refereed)
Chung E. & Figa, E. (2005). A Multidimensional Scale Model to Measure the Interactivity
of Virtual Storytelling. In (Gerard Subsol, Ed.), Proceedings Virtual Storytelling: Third International Conference, ICVS 2005 (pp. 239-248). Strasbourg, France, November 30-December 2, 2005. Strasbourg, France: Springer-Verlag GmbH.
Tarau, P., Mihalcea, R., & Figa, E. (2005). Semantic Document Engineering withWordNet
and PageRank. In Association for Computing Machinery (Eds.), Proceedings 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 782-786). Santa Fe, NM. New York: NY. The Association for Computing Machinery.
Figa, E. & Tarau, P. (2004). Conversational Agents as Web Services. In H.R. Arabia & Loaf Droegehorn (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Symposium on Web Services and Applications, II, 773-782. Las Vegas, NV. CSREA Press, Las Vegas, NV.
Figa, E. Tarau, P., & Ephraim, J. (2004). Enhancing the Virtual Storytelling Experience
With Metadata Driven Voice Enabled Conversational Agents. In John B. Bryans, (Ed.), Proceedings of the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 41, 403-410. Providence, R.I.
Mihalcea, R., Tarau, P., & Figa, E. (2004). PageRank on Semantic Networks, with
application to Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 1126-1132. Geneva Switzerland.
Tarau, P. & Figa, E. (2004). Knowledge-Based Conversational Agents and Virtual
Storytelling. In Association for Computing Machinery (Eds.), Proceedings 2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 39-44). Nicosia, Cyprus. New York: NY. The Association for Computing Machinery.
Tarau, P. Mihalcea, R., & Figa, E. (2004.) A Logic Programming Framework for Semantic
Interpretation with WordNet and PageRank. In M. Carro and Jose F. Morales (Eds.), In Proceedings of CICLOPS 2004, Fourth Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint and Logic Programming Systems, 83 – 84. Saint Malo, France.
Figa, E. & Tarau, P. (2003). Lexical Inference Mechanisms for Text Understanding and
Classification. In M. Bates & R. J. Todd, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (pp. 165-173). Long Beach, CA. Medford, NJ. Information Today, Inc.
Figa, E. & Tarau, P. (2003). The VISTA Project: An Agent Architecture for Virtual
Interactive Storytelling. In S. Gobel, N. Braun, U. Spierling, J. Dechau, & H. Diener, (Eds.), Proceedings Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (pp.106-116). Darmstadt, Germany: Fraunhofer IRB Verlag.
Conference Presentations (Refereed, Not Published)
Figa, E. Storytelling Techniques for Career and Change Management. Texas Library
Association Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, April 2004.
Figa, E. “A Brain to Pick, An Ear to Listen, and a Push in the Right Direction”: Training and Mentoring the Online Professors of the Future. Texas Distance Learning Conference, Research Track, Galveston, TX, March 2007.
Figa, E. A Human Information Seeking Behavior Model of Storytelling in the Academy. The 2006 National Storytelling Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, July, 2006.
Figa, E. & Macpherson, M. The Saga of Online Teaching: The Precepts, Practices, Pleasures and Pitfalls of Teaching Storytelling Via Web-Based Online Distance Courses – One Model. 2004 National Storytelling Conference, Bellingham, WA, July, 2004.
Figa, E. The Emergent Properties of Multimedia Applications in Storytelling Pedagogy: An Ethnography of the Teacher-Student Lens, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Storytelling Studies, Boca Raton, FL, March 2004.
Figa E. & Del Negro, J. From Fireplace and Cyberspace: An Interactive Dialogue about the Traditions, Trends, Technologies, and Tensions in Today’s Storytelling Pedagogy. National Storytelling Conference, Chicago IL, July 2003.
Figa, E. & Tarau, P. The VISTA Project: Virtual Interactive Storytelling Agents. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, New Orleans, LA, November 2002.
Figa E. Jean's Voice: A Rural Circuit Rider Medical Librarian Oral History Project. American Oral History Association Conference, Anchorage, AK, October 1999.
Invited Talks and Presentations
Figa, E. If it Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit: Storytelling Motifs, Taletypes, and Persuasive Narrativity in the Courtroom. Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law, Dallas, TX, March 2007.
Figa, E. From Puppets and Fairytales to MySpace and Blogs: Storytelling for Children and Teens in the Digital Age. University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences All School Day, Houston, TX, March 2006.
Figa, E. Magic Pills, Toy Boxes, and Imagination: The Cultural Legacies of Storytelling (Keynote Speaker). 2004 Harriet Dickson Reynolds Conference in Celebration of the Child -- Houston Diversity Realized: Empowering Houstonians for 100 Years! Houston, TX, October 2004.
CERTIFICATION AND LICENSURE
Certified Health Education Specialist #1794. National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc.
Registered Professional Nurse, State of Illinois, #041-234699
LIST OF COURSES TAUGHT
SLIS 5600 Information Access and Retrieval: Epistemological foundations of information use. Basic principles and techniques of information retrieval and access services. Survey of research in information seeking behavior and user interaction. Introduction to systems of access, search and retrieval skills, and collection management. Study of evaluation methods for all formats of resources, services and user satisfaction,
University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences, taught in Spring 2002, Fall 2002, Fall 2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2005, Fall 2006.
SLIS 5440 Storytelling for Information Professionals: (Formerly Youth Programs and Storytelling.) Storytelling ethnography, history, theory, methods, and bibliographic resources. Story research, analysis, selection, adaptation, and preparation. Oral performance development and audience dynamics. Program planning, implementation, evaluation, and grant writing for schools, libraries or other information settings.
University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences, taught in Spring 2001, Fall 2001, Spring 2002, Summer I 2002, Summer II 2002, Fall 2002, Spring 2003, Summer 2003, Fall 2003, Spring 2004, Fall 2004, Spring 2005, Fall 2005, Spring 2006, Summer 2006, Fall 2006, Spring 2007.