When beginning my very first co-op job search, I had no idea what employers would expect from me. It was a daunting task looking through the job postings and deciding what I thought I’d be (somewhat) qualified for. After a few job interviews, I applied to join the LINCS project, feeling confident that my skills aligned with the job requirements. Eventually, I was offered and accepted a job from LINCS, beginning a journey that has challenged my technical abilities every day and has expanded far past what I originally thought I’d be doing...

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs

If you are a developer, designer, or a creative individual interested in design, you are probably familiar with the phrase “good design is invisible.” Everything is designed—there is thought behind every project or product—but only a few things are designed well. When design is done poorly everyone tends to notice its flaws, but when design is done well it usually goes unnoticed...

In data science there is a commonly used process called Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). ETL involves three main steps:

1. Extract data from a source,
2. Transform the data via data cleansing and data manipulation, and
3. Load the transformed data to a data warehouse (the final collection of data) (Sethi, 2018)

Before having much experience in data processing, my colleague Devon and I were not sure what ETL was. Now, after jointly transforming an entire dataset from XML to a whole new structure utilizing triples using CIDOC CRM, we’re beginning to understand the process...

When I began working with ontologies at the LINCS project this summer, my colleagues and I quickly found ourselves asking exasperating questions like “How do you explain the visual concepts present in an artwork to a database?” Even more broad (and maybe ultimately unanswerable) questions like “what is a thing?” also began to arise.

Soon I was assigned to music data...

History has always been something I’ve been passionate about, and as an undergraduate student approaching graduation, I’ve become more eager to find ways to preserve primary sources. From my experience, having access to primary sources makes the researching process a lot easier, and these sources would not exist if there weren’t proper measures to preserve them.

If you’ve ever taken a history class, you probably know about the distinction between primary and secondary sources, and how primary sources are integral to the reliability of any history paper or assignment. Among primary sources in history, one type that goes largely unnoticed and can actually be hard to define is oral history...

In the summer of 2020, I was hired as a research assistant with the University of Guelph’s Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection. Initially, my job entailed the care and maintenance of the objects in the collection with a few other tasks as assigned. Of course, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I spent the entire summer not working with the objects themselves, but rather doing deep research from home, using whatever online sources I could find. This proved to be challenging because while the collection boasts objects from a variety of dates and creators, it is largely made up of the works of mid-to-late twentieth-century Canadian printmakers who have a limited online presence...

If there’s one thing I have learned during my library, archival, and information graduate studies, it is that information institutions are adverse to change. The archival profession progresses at a glacial pace. This is juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds made in information technology over the past twenty-five years. At first glance, it doesn’t make sense why many libraries are still using the antiquated MARC format for their bibliographic records, or why archival institutions in Canada are still mandated to use the 2008 release of Rules for Archival Description, which doesn’t have any real solution for describing electronic records...

I (Kathleen) was introduced to user interface design at the start of my post-secondary education with Software Design 1, the first class on the first day of my first (ever) semester. I crowded into a lecture hall with 150 other people, each of us more nervous and unsure than the last, and sat down to find out just what exactly was a degree in Software Engineering going to look like. It began with a warm introduction and then launched into a 45-slide PowerPoint on the twelve principles of design...

Over the many years I have worked on the LINCS project, I encountered many new terms. Sitting at my desk in THINC Lab, I used to hear people discussing something called ontologies. I would listen in to meetings about the creation of the CWRC ontology, and eventually I was asked to contribute by reading over the definitions proposed for it. Thinking that this would be the entirety of my ontology experience, I did my job but did not dig into any of the underlying technical concepts...

To avoid the COVID-19 outbreak, I moved back home from Guelph to the town of Bowmanville, a community with a population of around 40,000 people. My family sold our home of twenty years just before the pandemic, buying a quaint little house in Minden, Ontario, a town with only 4,000 residents. I consider myself lucky for moving back with my family when the outbreak began to worsen, even if I have gone from high-speed internet on the University of Guelph’s campus to fighting for bandwidth with the neighbours. Even if I also need to check for bears when leaving the house...