— Jingyi Long, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — In my first meeting this summer as a data science research assistant, we each followed our personal introductions with declarations of our favourite ice cream flavours. Mine was and continues to be Häagen Dazs’ Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn someone else […]

— Aliza Ferrone, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — I’ve always found that context changes everything when learning something new, especially when it comes to understanding why that something matters. The first example I can think of is how, for all the general chemistry courses I’ve taken, the concepts never really clicked, nor did I see […]

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

— Hannah Stewart, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]

— Jakob McLellan, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]

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 […]

— 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 […]

— Sarah Mousseau, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]