The Digital Fabrication Lab

Heejoung Shin is the Clinical Assistant Professor and Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she designs and oversees workshop curricula on quantitative text analysis, media and podcast design, and 3D modeling and fabrication technology at the UIC Library’s Digital Scholarship Hub. She serves as the first point of contact for digital scholarship projects needing library support. Her current research in library and information science encompasses artificial intelligence and critical digital design literacy through the lens of queer theory. She is presently working on an article for Library Trends, forthcoming in Spring 2026.

Her recent article, “Queer Machine Reading and Close Reading in Literary Studies in the Age of AI” (published in the 2025 special issue on Intelligence of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association), invites readers to critically engage with AI and machine learning rather than dismiss these technologies outright.

As a literary and cultural critic, she specializes in both interpretive and quantitative and digital approaches to 20th-century literature and digitized text. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Computational Literary Studies, The Review of Korean Studies, The Korean Studies Quarterly, and the Feminist Studies in English Literature. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, an MS/LIS from the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and an MA in English, along with three BAs in English Language and Literature, American Studies, and Multimedia Studies from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea.

Outside of her professional work, she enjoys yoga, and she welcomes conversations about martial arts, music, art, and K-pop/Korean culture.

Our lab is powered by brilliant student staff from across disciplines, including the liberal arts and sciences, engineering, and art and design. Their diverse backgrounds make the Lab a truly rich learning environment.

Here’s part of what our staff members do:

• They expertly maintain and care for our equipment.
• They are creators, always making and experimenting.
• They are inspiring teachers and generous collaborators.
• They are resourceful troubleshooters.
• They are real fixers.
• They conduct research on how 3D modeling and fabrication technology can drive meaningful innovation and present their research.

If you have questions about your individual 3D projects involving our 3D equipment, please email us at digitalscholarship@uic.edu and our staff will be happy to assist you.

For larger collaborations, please contact Heejoung Shin, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor and Digital Scholarship Librarian, at hs27@uic.edu