My work focuses on the intersection of library and information science (LIS) and digital humanities (DH), with particular emphasis on quantitative and computational methods. I examine how natural language and scholarly communication systems shape the production, organization, and circulation of knowledge in digital environments. This portfolio documents how this research agenda informs my work in research, teaching, systems development, and professional service.
My research investigates how knowledge is organized, communicated, and interpreted within library and information science and digital humanities contexts. Through quantitative and computational methods, I examine patterns in disciplinary boundaries, classification systems, and professional practices. Much of this work combines bibliometric analysis, natural language processing, and computational text analysis to study how scholarly communication systems structure the production and circulation of knowledge. My current projects focus on authorship patterns, discourse analysis of professional literature, and the relationship between knowledge organization systems and the texts they describe.
Mind the gap: Practitioner and researcher boundaries in LIS metadata discourse
This study examines practitioner–researcher relations in library and information science (LIS) through a computational analysis of metadata-focused publications (2004–2024). Drawing on ten practitioner- and researcher-oriented journals indexed in Web of Science, 237 abstracts containing the term “metadata” were coded by author status (librarian, non-librarian, collaborative) and analyzed using log-odds distinctive term analysis, collocation methods, and Sentence-BERT embeddings. Results show strong associations between journal type and authorship composition, as well as systematic lexical and rhetorical differences across groups. Librarian-authored abstracts emphasize operational and standards-oriented language, while non-librarian-authored abstracts foreground methodological framing. However, embedding-based semantic analysis reveals substantial thematic overlap, with gradient rather than sharply bounded clusters. These findings suggest that in metadata discourse, the research–practice gap is structurally real but conceptually porous, reflecting institutional and genre-based differentiation more than fundamental epistemic divergence.
Moulaison-Sandy, H. & Coble, Z. (2024). Leveraging AI in cataloging: What works, and why? Technical Services Quarterly, 41(4), 375–383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2024.2394912
ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are the latest in a long series of technologies that seem poised to support automated approaches to carrying out mundane tasks, including the creation of catalog records or portions of records. AI is a suite of technologies that have been around since the 1960s, and today, librarians are actively seeking to understand how best to harness them. Although systems like ChatGPT can create catalog records, their accuracy and adherence to norms cannot be taken at face value. Now is the time to look to the future and to be creative with the affordances of these technologies, but with a sense of the full understanding of the limitations. The notion that freely-available, general-purpose AI systems are able to solve cataloging problems easily, with the click of a button, if only the right prompt is created, is problematic to perpetuate – at least for now.
Coble, Z. & Shang, S. (2025). Does the semantic meaning of class names matter? A study of the Library of Congress classification. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 62(1), 1405–1407.https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1418.
This study examines whether the semantic meaning of Library of Congress Classification (LCC) class names provides additional insight beyond the system’s hierarchical structure for organizing knowledge. Using SBERT, a natural language processing (NLP) model for generating semantic embeddings, we investigate the relationship between the semantic meaning of LCC subclass names and the word usage patterns of the texts assigned to these subclasses. Our results show that although LCC subclass names with similar semantic meanings occasionally correspond to similar word usage patterns, there is no consistent relationship between the two. In contrast, whether two subclasses belong to the same main class reliably predicts the similarity of word usage in the texts assigned to them. While semantic embeddings of LCC subclass names offer intriguing possibilities, our findings indicate that the hierarchical structure of the LCC system remains more robust for knowledge organization.
[forthcoming] Christian-Lamb, C., Coble, Z., Eichmann-Kalwara, N., Potvin, S., Starry, R., Williams, P. (2028). Tracing the Evolution of Digital Humanities Librarianship: A Historical Study of the dh+lib Review. In K. Baker Josephs & L. Thomas (Eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities 2028. University of Minnesota Press.
The digital humanities have significantly reshaped the landscape of academic inquiry, and within this transformation, the role of librarians has become increasingly vital. This chapter gives a historical study of the dh+lib Review, a scholarly communication initiative in LIS founded in 2012. The dh+lib Review serves as a unique repository of knowledge, featuring thousands of posts that summarize resources, projects, jobs, events, and opportunities recommended by LIS professionals. By analyzing this community-driven initiative, the chapter aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of DH librarianship and its establishment as a critical component of the digital humanities.
Coronado, J. A., Pires, L. N., and Coble, Z. (2026, July 9-11). Where are the feminist economists? A publication analysis of an evolving field. 2026 International Association for Feminist Economics Conference, Cali, Colombia.
The field of feminist economics is distinguished by its interdisciplinary nature, broad methodological toolkit, and grounding in feminist epistemology, setting it apart from other economic areas of research. This unique positioning has significant implications for scholarly publication. While the field has grown steadily, which is evidenced by increasing engagement with IAFFE and its conferences, it is primarily served by a single dedicated journal, Feminist Economics (FE). This disparity between a growing, dynamic field and a limited publication infrastructure has sparked urgent community discussions on the need for additional journals. This paper develops a methodology to examine how the set of journals in FE's citation neighbourhood changes over time. We construct a FE-centered citation networks using bibliometrics data from Dimensions spanning 2000–2023. First, we compile time-varying inbound and outbound journal citation distributions for FE by linking FE articles to their referenced publications and by identifying the journals of publications that cite FE. Second, to ensure comparability across time in an interdisciplinary setting with long citation tails, we define a stable “community lens” of journals that exhibit persistent and non-trivial citation connections with FE yielding a lens of 298 journals. Third, within this fixed lens we construct restricted journal–journal citation matrices for subperiods and characterize changes in FE’s neighborhood through shifts in citation-share distributions, turnover among core partners, and changes in network structure. We apply community detection to the restricted networks using the Infomap algorithm, allowing us to track changes in FE’s module membership and the composition of adjacent modules over time. This complements previous research that have shown a change in profile of papers published at FE journal (see Tejani, 2019) and relates to findings by Coronado and Veneziani (2025) that FE journal is part of a separate but related heterodox economics network. This analysis provides empirical evidence of patterns in scholarly conversation in FE that can inform strategic decisions within the community regarding the development and diversification of its publication network.
Coble, Z., & Karlin, J. (2023). Reference rot in the digital humanities literature: An analysis of citations containing website links in Digital Humanities Quarterly. Digital Humanities Quarterly. https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/17/1/000662/000662.html
Coble, Z., Potvin, S., & Shirazi, R. (2014). Process as product: Scholarly communication experiments in the digital humanities. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(3), eP1137. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1137
Budd, J. M., Coble, Z., & Abritis, A. (2016). An investigation of retracted articles in the biomedical literature. In Proceedings of the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting. Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301055
Budd, J. M., Coble, Z., & Anderson, K. M. (2011). Retracted publications in biomedicine: Cause for concern. In Declaration of Interdependence: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2011 Conference. http://hdl.handle.net/11213/18246
My teaching practice seeks to prepare students to critically engage with information systems while developing strong methodological and technical skills. The activities below demonstrate my contributions to course design, instructional development, and graduate education in LIS and the digital humanities. I emphasize connecting theoretical concepts in information science with practical analytical tools, particularly in areas such as natural language processing, metadata, and digital scholarship. These experiences reflect my broader goal of helping students understand both how information systems work and how they shape knowledge production.
Pre-PhD work but included to demonstrate experience teaching graduate-level course. Class was a required course in New York University’s Digital Humanities graduate certificate. I developed the course to use project-based approach to web programming and development. I taught the course three times – once online and twice in-person.
My systems and theory development work centers on two primary domains: natural language and the scholarly communication system. The projects below demonstrate how I design and apply computational methods to analyze texts, publication networks, and the infrastructures that organize knowledge. This work often involves building reproducible research pipelines that integrate data collection, analysis, and visualization to support empirical investigations of information systems. By combining computational analysis with theoretical perspectives from information science, these projects aim to better understand how knowledge structures emerge and evolve within digital environments.
Final code repository · Working code repository
For this independent study, I created a full NLP research pipeline, including corpus creation, analysis, and visualization. This corpus analytics study used a mixture of established (tf-idf, cosine similarity) and modern NLP techniques (SBERT) to examine links between books' Library of Congress Classification and word usage patterns.
Group project examining the evaluation of machine translation by training an LLM to better capture localization. I contributed to research design, investigation and analysis (evaluator of LLM Portuguese > English translations, created taxonomy for human evaluation), and visualization and paper writing.
Study analyzing the evolution of topics in the digital library literature between 1996-2023. I performed content analysis on 16,689 abstracts from articles indexed in the Library and Information Science Source database, using k-means clustering to identify topical groups.
Professional service is an essential component of scholarly responsibility in the library and information science and digital humanities communities. The activities below reflect my contributions to editorial work, peer review, and professional organizations that sustain the field’s intellectual and institutional infrastructure.
I am committed to active participation in the library and information science and digital humanities communities. The activities listed below reflect my efforts to build professional networks, contribute to scholarly exchange, and prepare for sustained engagement in the field.
Member, Grupo Scientia research group, Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), – present
Presenter: Pós-graduação em Ciência da Informação nos EUA, Grupo Scientia (online),
Participant, Crossref Metadata Sprint, São Paulo, Brazil, March 2026
Presenter, CEHD Graduate Student Research Symposium, University of Missouri, February 2026
Member, Digital Theory Lab, New York University, –
Participant, Introduction to Interpretability for Language Models summer school (online),
Participant, “Domain Analysis (DA): Interdisciplinary Methodological Perspectives in KO),” ASIS&T Classification & Metadata Research SIG,
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