LINCS Blog

Ice cream, Binaries, and Maybes

  • LINCS Project
  • April 25, 2023

— 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 […]

Piecing the Past Together With LOD

  • LINCS Project
  • April 14, 2023

— 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 […]

Stand-ups for Software Development

  • LINCS Project
  • March 3, 2023

— Eason Liang, LINCS computer science co-op — When I began my first co-op placement, I had no idea how software development worked in a professional environment. Previously, my experience had only been in the classroom, where  my classmates and I developed software for assignments. When I moved into a professional context, I was exposed […]

— Mohammed Marzookh Farook & Ananya Rao, LINCS Junior Research Analysts — If you’ve ever listened in on a technical conversation between computer scientists, you might’ve heard them refer to something called an API. What exactly is an API? Let’s break it down. An application is any software that performs a distinct function. Microsoft Excel […]

— Basil Yusuf, LINCS computer science co-op — LINCS is using ResearchSpace as a platform for exploring relationships in interlinked cultural datasets. With ResearchSpace, researchers can browse, search, and visualize data in the LINCS datastore. In summer 2022, I was part of a team that was developing new features for LINCS’s version of ResearchSpace. Our […]

Researching and Designing for Actionability

  • LINCS Project
  • February 10, 2023

— Jordan Lum, LINCS UX co-op — The UX team has been conducting user research on LINCS tools to get them ready to move from development to production. So far, we have completed card sorts, usability tests, surveys, and interviews. This research has provided us with a wealth of information. However, if we want to […]

The Design Deep Dive

  • LINCS Project
  • November 4, 2022

— Farhad Omarzad, LINCS UX undergraduate research assistant — 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 […]

Jessica and Goliath: Learning 3M and CIDOC CRM

  • LINCS Project
  • October 20, 2022

— Ze Xi (Jessica) Ye, LINCS metadata co-op — 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 […]

— 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 […]