Wan-Chen Lee

Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies

Education

PhD in Information Studies, University of Washington
Master of Science in Information Science, University of Washington
Master of Library and Information Science, University of Washington
Bachelor of Arts in Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University

Bio

Wan-Chen Lee is an assistant professor and a member of the Knowledge Organization Research Group at the School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She received her MLIS and PhD at the University of Washington Information School. Her research interests are knowledge organization, culture and resource description, classification theory, and metadata. Fluent in English, Mandarin, and Japanese, Dr. Lee is particularly interested in the challenges and considerations of inclusive data work, which includes designing knowledge organization standards for different cultural contexts. She interrogates inclusivity in knowledge organization through document analysis and ethnography. Through scheme comparison, participatory observation, and interview, she addresses the ethical issues, interoperability concerns, and global-local tensions in cataloging and classification. She also studies the cultural stewardship of, and access to, multimedia resources. To support effective description, representation, and retrieval of multimedia resources, she collaborates with scholars across institutions on projects for video game metadata, anime genres, and mood descriptors for fictions.

Courses Taught

INFOST 511: Organization of Information
INFOST 771: Data curation
INFOST 910: Doctoral Seminar in the Organization of Information

Grants

Principal Investigator, Ethical AI and Librarianship: A Resource Guide. American Library Association (ALA) Carnegie-Whitney Grant (08/01/2024-07/31/2025)

Principal Investigator, Ethical AI: Challenges and Opportunities. Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute (NMDSI) Student Research Scholars Program (07/2024-12/2024)

Principal Investigator, Emoji and Emotion Categories of Fictions. UWM Research Assistance Fund (08/04/2022-06/30/2023)

Sample Publications

Lee, W.-C., Huang, L.-M.C., & Hirt, J. (2024). From amused to 😆: Enriching mood metadata by mapping textual descriptors to emojis for fiction reading. Journal of Documentation, 80(2), 552-571. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2023-0146

Cho, H., Lee, W.-C., Huang, L.-M., & Kohlburn, J. (2023). User-centered categorization of mood in fiction, Journal of Documentation, 79(3), 567-588. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2022-0071

Cho, H., Disher, T., Lee, W.-C., Keating, S. A., & Lee, J. H. (2020). Facet analysis of anime genres: The challenges of defining genre information for popular cultural objects. Knowledge Organization, 47(1), 13-30. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2020-1-13

Lee, W.-C. (2019). Cataloging practices through an ethnographic lens: Workarounds, disagreements, and manifestations of culture. In Proceedings from North American Symposium of Knowledge Organization, vol. 7. (pp. 129-137). (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/article/view/15633/13015

Keating, S., Lee, W.-C., Windleharth, T., & Lee, J. H. (2017). The style of Tetris is…possibly Tetris?: Creative professionals’ description of video game visual styles. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2017. (pp. 2046-2055). (Puako, Hawaii). https://doi.org/10.24251/hicss.2017.248

Lee, W.-C. (2016). An exploratory study of the subject ontogeny of eugenics in the New Classification Scheme for Chinese Libraries and the Nippon Decimal Classification. Knowledge Organization, 43(8), 594–608. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2016-8-594

Lee, W.-C. (2015). Culture and classification: An introduction to thinking about ethical issues of adopting global classification standards to local environments. Knowledge Organization, 42(5), 302–307. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2015-5-302