— Emily McKibbon, LINCS metadata co-op — 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 […]

— Nem Brunell, LINCS UX co-op — 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 […]

— Evan Rees, LINCS UX co-op — 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 […]

How working for a DH project has broadened my academic interests and comfort zone — Hannah Stewart, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]

— Sana Javeed, LINCS UX co-op — Before becoming a UX Design student at University of Toronto, I used to solve a problem just by identifying what the problem was and then coming up with a band-aid solution. However, over a period of time, I realized that by using such an approach—opting for the easiest […]

— Dawson MacPhee, LINCS computer science co-op — 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 […]

— Amardeep Singh, LINCS computer science co-op — “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 […]

— Justin Francis, LINCS Junior Programmer — A general Extract Transform Load process 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 […]

— Sam Peacock, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]

— Gracy Go, undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]