Congratulations to PhD student Brian M. Watson on receiving a Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) grant for their project HistSex. Brian is the Director of this project, founded in 2020. HistSex, a common abbreviation for “History of Sexuality”, is an open access, interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, and international resource for information on the history of sexuality. This grant will allow Brian to hire graduate students for this project and further develop the HistSex database, to connect it with other national and international databases.
About HistSex
The first public resource released was 50 Years On, Many Years Past: Nonfictions of Sexuality. It aimed to fill an often-overlooked need for the historical representation of LGBTQ+ identity. It collects a bibliography that focuses on queer sexuality from 1969 to the present. This information is presented in an easily searchable format and ranked for audience reading level, and sortable by topic, time, and place.
For more information about this project, visit the HistSex official website.
About Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS)
Contemporary scholars have unprecedented access to quantities of material online, but their searches are often hampered by the lack of meaningful connections between resources. As a result, most scholars interact with cultural data only through reading—and not by leveraging algorithmic processes to draw on a wider range of evidence.
Officially founded in April 2020, LINCS responds to the need to create linked web content that serves academic and public rather than corporate interests, and it recognizes that the complexity of the technologies involved means that this cannot happen without a shared, open infrastructure. They use Semantic Web technologies to make the web smarter by structuring and linking data. Semantic Web interlinks Canadian research and heritage data from across the web, converting, connecting, enhancing, and making accessible previously heterogeneous and siloed datasets. Such linking provides pathways towards new insights through networked knowledge production, both within and beyond Canada.
