As an English student, I was always told to keep my writing concise. Doing so was often easy because I could assume that the person reading my work would be an English scholar, so their expectations of my writing and the knowledge they brought to it would sit within a very specific range. In this way, I trained myself to default to an academic tone and level of complexity and to produce writing that was comparative and analytical.

This summer, however, as a member of the LINCS documentation team, I worked on an entirely different kind of writing: user guides and instruction manuals for the many software tools developed or employed by the project. To begin writing documentation, I first had to relearn how to write...

During my time at LINCS, the UX team has laid the groundwork for implementing an intuitive and effortless user flow for ResearchSpace. To accomplish this, we have conducted numerous user and usability tests, interviews, and card sorts.

Working on ResearchSpace was my first real experience in the world of UI/UX. It was also my first time working on a design team, and I was blown away by the talent of my peers...

Over the past two years I’ve had chances to work on many aspects of the Orlando Project, but the work that I’ve consistently found the most engaging has been researching and writing author profiles. Orlando’s profiles are collaboratively authored scholarly histories, which are structured by a custom XML tagset, and which allow researchers to explore the intersections between women’s lives and their creative production. During my first summer as Digital Humanities (DH) Research Assistant, I began work on the profile on Lili Elbe; in the past year, I started writing a profile on Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. As I put the finishing touches on these profiles, I’ve noticed that both women’s life stories highlight the overlap between the personal and the political, and between individual identity and the limits imposed on creative work...

During my graduate courses in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, I gained a high-level understanding of Linked Open Data (LOD) and the CIDOC CRM ontology, a theoretical and practical tool for information integration in the field of cultural heritage. Because I am an Archives & Records Management student, I never expected to understand LOD and CIDOC CRM to a significant degree, and certainly not to the degree that my position as a Metadata Specialist co-op at LINCS requires of me...

The Digital Humanities (DH) was not something I had a lot of experience with before starting as a LINCS undergraduate research assistant. My work with LINCS pertains to the Early Modern London project, working alongside the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) team. Part of my job is what LINCS refers to as reconciliation, or what MoEML refers to as disambiguation...

If each part of a ship were replaced over time, when, if ever, does it become a new ship?

Little did Heraclitus, Plato, and others know that the problems posed by the “Ship of Theseus” paradox would continue to vex digital humanists in the twenty-first century...

My first job in the museums field was in 2008, right at the height of the Great Recession. The digitization team I joined had just lost roughly a quarter of their staff in a series of buyouts and layoffs, and the mood was grim. We were tasked with getting a large collection of historic photographs online, and the sooner the better—the only rub was that the collection wasn’t fully catalogued, and doing so properly would take time that we did not have. The pressure was on to justify our jobs, and so the discussions we had about metadata leaned towards the provisional. If the database is unpopulated, does just the accession number suffice? Okay, what about the accession number and artist? The solutions we came up with reflected the stressors of that moment: we aimed for something good enough in lieu of something exemplary, carefully balancing data requirements with the drive to generate content.

For the next decade and a half or so, Winnicott’s “good enough” parent has been a guiding principle in my role as a data custodian...

The situation is this: you’ve been asked to design a way for a researcher to easily move between two tools. You familiarize yourself with both tools, learn about the known issues, and read about what’s already been tried. You spend a few days deciding on the best way to get from point A to point B. You spend a few more days designing how it will look. Finally, you unveil your prototype in a meeting with the development team ... only to find out that moving between the tools is not technically possible. Or that it would take too long to build your design. Or that moving between tools opens up new issues on the back end.

How do you go forward? ...

The road to UX for me has been long and winding, and I, much like the LINCS users in the Tube Map in Figma, have found myself at various stations along the way, assessing where I should go next. Initially studying Life Sciences at University of Toronto, I made the switch after first year to a specialism in Sociocultural Anthropology. Upon graduation and unsure where to go with my career, I began a Masters of Public and International Affairs at University of Ottawa. I quickly realised that I was too passive by nature to be a diplomat, and I lacked the passion for politics that many in my cohort shared. What I really wanted was something related to my background in Anthropology.

And so, enter UofT’s Faculty of Information...

I joined the LINCS Project as an undergraduate research assistant, mainly to work on the Orlando Project. This position gave me my first real experience with Digital Humanities (DH). Before starting the job I could barely have come up with even a vague definition of DH (despite my best efforts and quite a bit of Googling). When I finally did start to get a sense of the nature of DH—a field that brings together humanities research and new technologies, birthing new possibilities and adding depth to research—there were elements of it that felt very familiar and in line with the sort of work I had experience with as an undergraduate student majoring in English...