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...

As a Cyberinfrastructure project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, LINCS is building its infrastructure on the resources of Compute Canada which operates a Cloud service run with OpenStack.

Cinder is the default volume storage provider for virtual machines provisioned on the OpenStack platform of Compute Canada. It is the last layer of a complex multi-tenant system that abstracts Ceph storage and hypervisors on top of hard disk drives. It is, however, the closest you can get to the network-attached storage (NAS) system of Compute Canada...

There are many graph databases out there that support Resource Description Framework (RDF): Virtuoso, GraphDB, Stardog, AnzoGraph, and RDFox, to name just a few popular ones. But if the requirements for your triplestore include open source, as it does for our CFI funded LINCS project, then Blazegraph and Apache’s Jena Fuseki are two of your most mature options...

Pop psychology has a concept most of us are familiar with: the linear, calculating left brain vs. the intuitive, creative right brain. The theory is that you either use one or the other, you’re either left-brained dominant or you’re right-brained dominant, but you can’t be both. This myth has been debunked many times over, but still you can find countless Facebook articles and Pinterest links with quizzes to tell you which side of your brain is the one in the driver’s seat. Even if you don’t buy into the left and right brain theory, we’ve still managed to try to separate logic from creativity, arts from sciences.

For me, this has always seemed a little off...

The core of the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project is the simple proposition that making Linked Open Data (LOD) out of the stuff scholars use to understand and analyze culture will make a difference. LINCS hopes to make a difference to how we can make sense of the human past and present. It aims to enable such work within and beyond academic contexts, and in so doing to improve how things cultural can be presented and circulated on the World Wide Web.

I say stuff and things to demystify the notion of data. Those who make culture seldom think of themselves as creating data, and neither do those who collect, celebrate, curate, and analyze cultural objects, processes, and events. But everything we make and do can be represented as data and circulated on the Web, and a large part of contemporary culture is Web culture...