Ann Brocklehurst

U of T grad discovers a passion for accessibility research and design

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:28:58 +0000

U of T grad discovers a passion for accessibility research and design

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 10/28/2024 - 14:28

Cutline

Alexander Parent (seated in blue shirt) helps adapt toys for children with disabilities at a Dis/Usability workshop held in the Faculty of Information’s Makerspace

Ann Brocklehurst

Topic

Our Community

Convocation 2024

Accessibility

Faculty of Information

Subheadline

Alexander Parent, who has a mild form of cerebral palsy that affects the right side of his body, focused on design and critical disability studies

The first in his family to attend university, Alexander Parent felt like he had already exceeded expectations before pursuing a master’s degree in user experience design at the University of Toronto – then he fell in love with his research.

With a mild form of cerebral palsy that affects the right side of his body, Parent focused on design and critical disability studies – including designing adaptive toys for children with disabilities.

He says his work in the field emphasizes the importance of understanding end users.

“I feel like designing technology in a vacuum isn’t beneficial,” says Parent, who will receive his degree this week during U of T’s fall convocation and is now pursuing a PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences at New York University. “And it potentially can be dangerous and risky if you don’t talk with communities and others to understand what technology you need to make for those people.

“A big discussion in our field is learning how to do this in partnership, in a co-design way, rather than how it’s been done historically.”

Alexander Parent (supplied image)

On the design side, Parent’s focus has been “do-it-yourself assistive devices” and conducting research work with “people as partners and co-designers” – an approach he studied in an accessibility and inclusive design course taught by Priyank Chandra, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information who is the director of the STREET Lab.

Parent worked to put theory into practice. He helped organize a workshop – put on by the STREET Lab and a student-run Accessibility Interests Working Group that he chaired – on how to modify toys for children with disabilities using 3D-printed parts. It took advantage of resources in the Faculty of Information’s Makerspace and was carried out in partnership with Makers Making Change, an organization that 3D prints assistive devices for people with disabilities.

“I'm really proud of that event because a bunch of people not only got to learn skills, in terms of how to make things, but also to have critical conversations about why this is important,” says Parent, who also earned a bachelor’s degree from U of T.

The event proved popular, leading to two subsequent workshops.

Students worked to create remote control cars that could be operated by children who might not have the strength or fine motor skills to use the small buttons found on most controllers.

Their solution? Much larger buttons that enabled kids to operate the cars with a whole hand, elbow or another body part. The modified toys, achieved through a combination of 3D-printed parts and rewired electronics, were ultimately donated to ErinoakKids, the treatment and development centre that Parent attended as a child.

Meanwhile, Chandra had suggested Parent check out the work of New York University’s Amy Hurst, a pioneer in working collaboratively with people with disabilities in makerspaces.

“It was the ideal fit for the kind of work I want to do in the future,” says Parent, who contacted Hurst to discuss his research and mentioned that he would be referencing her work in his thesis.

He ultimately decided to submit an application to pursue his PhD with Hurst.

“We got on a phone call and [Hurst] said that not only would I be welcomed at New York University, but they're giving me a fellowship to go study there,” Parent said last spring. “So, I'm the first one in my family to get an undergraduate degree, and now a master's degree, and one day, a PhD from NYU.

“I'm still blown away.”

Parent is coming home from New York to attend his convocation ceremony – and to maintain his U of T connections and build a network of accessibility professionals, which now includes an Instagram account for the student-run Accessibility Interests Working Group that he once chaired.

“We need to continue to have the discussions that we began even after we've graduated,” says Parent. “What we do as designers matters and who we involve as equals in the process matters.”

Through film, U of T grad aims to help STEM-trained immigrant women overcome barriers

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 15:05:57 +0000

Through film, U of T grad aims to help STEM-trained immigrant women overcome barriers

geoff.vendeville Wed, 06/08/2022 - 11:05

Cutline

Library and archives grad Elizabeth Kalbfleisch says her film is meant to be a conversation starter, helping draw attention to the challenges immigrant women with STEM credentials face in Canada (photo courtesy of Kalbfleisch)

Ann Brocklehurst

Convocation 2022

Graduate Stories

Faculty of Information

Immigration

As a master's student in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information, Elizabeth Kalbfleisch teamed up with a professor and an entrepreneur to help communicate their research through a short animated film.

Kalbleisch remembers being angered by the findings of a report by Professor Nadia Caidi and Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, that focused on 74 STEM-educated, immigrant women who were unable to find work in their fields due to obstacles facing them in the job market – although they were actively recruited as highly trained workers.

“The results were so stunning to me,” says Kalbfleisch who took Caidi’s course on communities and values during her first semester in the fall of 2020. “I wanted people to know about this and not for it to roll over as just another headline about the challenge of the immigrant experience.”

A grant from the Mitacs Accelerate program enabled Caidi and Muzaffar to hire Kalbfleisch to share the story of their research beyond the traditional academic channels. Together, they settled on making an animated film.

“We thought if we could make something beautiful, it might grab people’s attention,” Kalbleisch says. “The film is meant to be a conversation starter, a way to get people talking about these issues. For many people watching a five-minute video online is easier than reading an 80-page report.”

Elizabeth Kalbfleisch and animator Dani Elizondo (bottom right) worked together online to workshop a scene from the film.

Aesthetics were hugely important to Kalbfleisch, who has taught art history and worked in the museum and cultural sectors. She also wanted the video to convey the message of the research in a nuanced way.

To find an animator, she put out feelers to her network, sending inquiries to everyone she knew, and found Dani Elizondo last summer. “Dani connected with the issues in the film,” says Kalbfleisch, explaining that the two worked closely together to develop the collage look used in the film and to create Maia, its main character. Doing the animation took several months. “It was so painstaking and time-consuming for Dani to do. The labour she put into this was extraordinary,” Kalbfleisch says.

When Kalbfleisch presented the finished product, titled We Were Here All Along, to Caidi’s class in March, it inspired the students to think about what’s known as “arts-based knowledge translation” as another option in their information toolkits. It was also the first time Caidi and Kalbfleisch had met in person despite having interacted virtually every week for months.

The plan now is to use the film to raise awareness and to complement other forms of research dissemination. Its target audience includes employers in STEM industries, immigrant settlement agencies who support newcomers, civil servants and analysts who are designing immigration policy, and information professionals who work at the community level and the broader public.

In their study, Caidi and Muzaffar identified many intertwined issues that are sketched out in the video. “Employers need a better understanding of what their own hiring practices are. Settlement workers are really well -ntentioned but their focus is often ‘let’s get a job’ even if it’s not necessarily the right fit,” says Kalbfleisch. “From an information perspective, something is broken in the transmission of information. It does not take into account the variety of contexts that the women operate in.”

As the film is rolled out, Kalbfleisch is working on another project with Caidi, funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, which looks at COVID-19 vaccination and misinformation on digital platforms used by newcomers to Canada.

With convocation just around the corner, Kalbfleisch is excited that her two daughters will be able to watch her receive her degree. She's also looking forward to embarking on an exciting career. “Working on this project showed me that I can do something else with these skills other than working in an archive or a library,” she said. “I have a more open mind towards the kind of opportunities I’m looking for than when I came in.”

Calling it a 'natural fit,' U of T librarian opts for familiar setting in debut mystery novel

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 15:14:18 +0000

Calling it a 'natural fit,' U of T librarian opts for familiar setting in debut mystery novel

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 03/21/2022 - 11:14

Cutline

Eva’s Jurczyk, co-ordinator of humanities collections at Robarts Library, picked a university library as the setting for her novel The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections because it's a world she knows well (photo courtesy of Jurczyk)

Topic

Faculty of Information

For readers with ties to the University of Toronto, Eva Jurczyk’s debut mystery novel The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections offers more than a whodunnit to solve.

In addition to figuring out who is responsible for the precious manuscripts going missing from a major university’s library, readers can also try to guess where she might have drawn inspiration from her day job at U of T.

Was that rare book librarian who works on a campus in downtown Toronto really once a spy? Is a senior administrator really training for an iron man competition in real life? And would it truly be that easy to replace a precious manuscript with a forgery while surrounded by scholars and subject matter experts?

Jurczyk, who is the co-ordinator of humanities collections at Robarts Library, says she was told a that a previous unpublished novel was “‘too quiet,’ which was probably a really polite way of saying it was too boring.” So the alumna of the Faculty of Information set about looking for an environment and a plot line that would keep readers turning the pages.

She settled on the world of libraries – which is both popular among book readers and a subject she knows intimately – and a mystery format.

While she doesn’t work in rare books, she had been a student assistant at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library while completing her master’s degree in library and information science. And as someone who had always been interested in the tales of art forgery and rare book theft regularly as chronicled by magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Jurczyk says she thought that such a plot would be a “natural fit” if she was going to use a library setting.

She researched the topic systematically to understand both the type of person who would steal rare books and the manuscripts themselves.

“The thieves are mostly men – often single men. And it’s almost always people on the inside. There’s the occasional ‘smash and grab’ job, but it’s rare. It’s almost never for money because these are things that are incredibly hard to resell. It’s usually somebody who’s just deeply passionate about this material and wants to keep it for himself,” says Jurczyk.

“Often, when the police do catch these people, they find the work has just been in someone’s apartment, under their bed or in their filing cabinet, and they just wanted it near them. And so that’s who steals it – just somebody who loves the work so much that they need to be near it.”

Those are exactly the type of people who surround Jurczyk’s fictional 60-something librarian sleuth Liesl Weiss, who, after decades in a background role, suddenly finds herself promoted into the job of her charismatic boss when he has a stroke. The mystery she needs to solve: Which one of her quirky colleagues is responsible for the missing manuscripts, a classic Agatha Christie-style plot.

The book, published in January, has proven a success so far. The virtual book tour drew plenty of readers and Jurczyk was thrilled to see her debut novel reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, a rare honour. “It was not only that they reviewed it, but they were very kind about it, which was a dream come true,” says Jurczyk, who has almost finished a non-mystery second novel.

As for the mystery of how many of the characters come from real life, the short answer is bits and pieces. Yes, Jurczyk has worked with vain colleagues and those who used Discmans long past their sell-by date. She “ratcheted up these small characteristics” in her novel, but, no, she’s never reported to a bicycle helmet-toting university executive who was training for an iron man competition and flexed his calf muscles in meetings.

“I can also say with a lot of confidence that I did not ever work with anyone that was stealing priceless manuscripts,” she says, a reminder to those who would believe otherwise that her book is indeed, as it’s billed, a work of fiction.

With help of their prof, U of T students go from being Wikidata novices to international conference presenters

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 14:31:32 +0000

With help of their prof, U of T students go from being Wikidata novices to international conference presenters

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/02/2021 - 10:31

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A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Stacy Allison-Cassin, an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Faculty of Information, is interested in using Wikidata to document of Indigenous matters and further equity.

Ann Brocklehurst

Topic

Our Community

Database

Faculty of Information

Graduate Students

Indigenous

When Stacy Allison-Cassin began teaching students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information how to understand the tools, techniques and practices of documenting cultural records, she quickly identified Wikidata as an ideal platform.

While not as well known as Wikipedia, Wikidata is a database of knowledge – as opposed to an online encyclopedia – that can be edited by anyone. It is also more flexible and less complex than other formal library platforms, according to Allison-Cassin, an assistant professor, teaching stream, and a Wikidata user herself.

Cora Coady, one of Allison-Cassin’s students, says she preferred working in Wikidata to Wikipedia, where articles can be deleted or rejected. For example, Coady says she was unable to get a Wikipedia moderator to accept that Jacey Firth-Hagen, a promoter of Inuktitut language revitalization who is featured in the Canadian Encyclopedia, should have her own Wikipedia entry.

“With Wikidata, you don’t usually get flagged for that sort of thing,” Coady says. “Once you finish doing it, it’s published.”

Wikidata works by creating what’s known as structured data with data elements that are given a machine-readable semantic meaning. This semantically structured data enables more powerful machine processing and querying, which ultimately aids in findability and visibility on the internet.

Wikidata also allows for the linking of items to other data stores. For example, a researcher item in Wikidata can be linked to the same researcher item in the Virtual International Authority File with a “same as” connection. Because Wikidata is very large and openly available, it is playing an increasingly powerful role within the linked data cloud.

While “going from zero to Wikidata” can be a bit of a challenge, Allison-Cassin says at least three of her master of information students’ Wikidata projects were so impressive by the end of her course – titled “Representing, Documenting and Accessing the Cultural Record” (INF1321H) – that she invited them to present at the LD4 Conference on Linked Data last summer.

At the conference, Coady spoke about documenting the IM4 Lab, an Indigenous matriarchs’ lab in British Columbia that supports Indigenous artists and media professionals who use of augmented and virtual reality; Julia Gilmore described how she had documented Toronto’s public swimming culture; and Adam Cavanaugh discussed how and why he narrowed his project from documenting biodiversity in Toronto’s High Park to focusing on the park’s Black Oak Savannah as a specific ecosystem.

Coady says her research on the IM4 Lab revealed most existing documentation had been generated by the matriarchs themselves.

“I found it disconcerting,” she says, noting that the women had made TV shows and films as we well as writing books. “Often people don’t consider that Indigenous media is for everybody – not just Indigenous Peoples. They’re losing out if they don’t see it as having value for everyone.”

As part of her project, Coady, a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, created Wikidata items for three of the four matriarchs – Doreen Manuel, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Tracey Kim Bonneau – and enhanced existing documentation for the fourth, Loretta Todd. She also discovered and documented the lab’s newly launched “Immersive Knowledge Transfer” podcast.

Shaped by the needs and interests of its community of users, Wikidata has thousands of items for books, films and people, as well as extensive user discussion on how to document them.

However, Gilmore says she found far less information about buildings and even less about swimming pools. Such a lack of documentation can make creating an item and deciding on which properties it should have a more complex process than for a more well-defined area such books.

A further complication is what are known as “data dependencies.” For example, Gilmore says, if she wanted to say a swimming pool was named after a person, that person would also need to exist as an item in Wikidata. If they weren’t already in Wikidata, she would have to create that item as well. Since she wanted to connect two of her favorite pieces of writing about swimming – Swimming Studies, a memoir by Leanne Shapton and The Swimming Pool Library, an essay by Naomi Skwarna – to the pools she intended to catalogue, Gilmore decided to follow the model of a Wiki member who had used the “narrative location” property to create a map of places in Copenhagen featured in different books.

“I really liked this suggestion as it helped to bring the experience of swimming in these pools to the surface and situated the pools within a larger cultural framework,” she explained in her conference presentation.

Cavanaugh, who wanted to represent High Park’s land through themes of biodiversity, was wary of classifying land based on municipal standards, categories and co-ordinates. He eventually decided the best way to proceed with his project would be documenting High Park’s Black Oak Savannah visually through photos he took and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

As he did this, he found himself encountering and dealing with many of the issues raised in the readings for the course, including how Canadian colonial settlement can affect the cultural record and why there are tensions between the ethos of open access and traditional knowledge systems.

For example, Cavanaugh was puzzled by why he kept encountering two spellings of the word “savannah” – one with an “H” and one without. Researching the etymology of the word revealed that it came from the Spanish word “sabana” and that its use can be traced back to the 16th century when Spanish colonizers took the Taino Indigenous people’s word “zabana,” meaning treeless plain, and applied it to a transitional grassland ecosystem found in other colonial contexts such as Africa.

Cavanaugh wondered if by using the dominant classifying schemes for his Wikidata entries he “might be seen as capitulating to the process of cultural linguistic absorption.”

All three of the students agree that the act of cataloguing using Wikidata had demonstrated that it is a subjective experience. At the same time, they also saw a great potential to re-imagine how cultural records are described and documented.

As an Indigenous student, Coady says she and others often feel the responsibility to discuss important ongoing issues such as residential schools and the disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Such work is “difficult and exhausting, and the result is an overwhelming journalistic and scholarly landscape of trauma,” she told the conference. “Perhaps we should also feel the same need to build documentation that recognizes people’s accomplishments and successes.

“Indigenous people deserve visibility and our children deserve to know that there are and have been great Indigenous role models.”

Allison-Cassin, a member of of the Métis Nation of Ontario, agrees that Wikidata is a useful tool to document Indigenous matters and is interested in using the platform to further equity.

“Working on Wikimedia projects is a way for me to make my community visible and call attention to areas where inequity is present,” says Allison-Cassin, who chairs the Indigenous matters section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. “I am now involved with many international groups with a more activist bent.”

Mobile tech kits to aid First Nations seeking to recover art, culture and knowledge

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 15:29:04 +0000

Mobile tech kits to aid First Nations seeking to recover art, culture and knowledge

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 07/19/2021 - 11:29

Cutline

Digital tools can help reconnect cultural items like this Anishinaabe birch bark container with their original environments, U of T researchers say (photo courtesy of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Cultures)

Ann Brocklehurst

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Information

Indigenous

Research & Innovation

Researchers at the University of Toronto are assembling mobile research kits designed to help Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes region recover and rejuvenate cultural knowledge, artistic practices and languages.

Cara Krmpotich

The 20 backpack kits – which include “rugged laptops” equipped for mobile broadband, audio and video recording equipment, virtual and augmented reality headsets and 360-degree cameras – will allow community partners to “do digital cultural heritage work on the land,” says Cara Krmpotich, an associate professor of museum studies at the Faculty of Information and a primary investigator in this research project.

“The idea is that the same technologies we might use in an urban setting should also be available to our research partners in their communities. They don’t have to come to Toronto to have access to the equipment and to do the work they want to do.”

Krmpotich says that digital media already comprise an active, creative and frequented space for Indigenous social, linguistic, cultural and political communication and knowledge-sharing. She adds that the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) – of which Krmpotich is co-director – was an early innovator in methods for “digital reunification.” It designed a database to help reunite Indigenous communities in the region with material heritage from the Great Lakes that had been dispersed globally in museums, archives and researchers’ collections.

She says the current goal to mobilize the next generation to create digital media and art, and to support creative practices in communities that move beyond digital cataloguing. The self-contained kits have been designed to allow a variety of work, ranging from very basic activities such as scanning family photographs to more experimental VR work that includes doing a walkthrough of the bush while gathering birch bark.

“The idea of doing digital cultural work is to digitally reunite cultural belongings that are in museums with the lands, the water, the people and the animals and plants that they were originally connected with – those home places and home environments,” says Krmpotich.

The project’s research partners include U of T students and faculty, members of the Rama and Nipissing First Nations, as well as Anishinaabeg artists and researchers from Michigan State University. All are current members of GRASAC, whose active research relationships extend throughout the Great Lakes and globally. Associate Professor Heidi Bohaker in U of T’s department of history, helped to create GRASAC and is currently its co-director as well as being a co-investigator on the mobile research kits project.

Student research assistants are assembling the kits this summer and will assist with training community partners when the kits are delivered this fall. The kits include the following items:

Digital SLR cameras
Raspberry pis
VR/AR headsets and 360-degree cameras
Portable scanners
Audio recording equipment
“Rugged” laptops equipped for mobile broadband

“Sharing digital capacity supports self-representation, self-determination, and creative expression, which are all essential components of cultural heritage work,” says Krmpotich.

The project’s target audiences include Indigenous artists and language learners; primary, secondary and post-secondary teachers in Ontario; and curators and academic researchers responsible for the stewardship of Great Lakes cultural heritage and knowledge.

While Krmpotich emphasizes that digital practices are in no way intended to replace physical ones, she says, “the pandemic has really opened up communities to experiment with digital methods – that’s what these kits are all about. I think people will welcome the ability to not simply be doing Zoom but to create collectively with digital tools.”

First cohort of students to graduate with bachelor of information degree from U of T

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 16:38:38 +0000

First cohort of students to graduate with bachelor of information degree from U of T

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 06/04/2021 - 12:38

Cutline

The Claude T. Bissell Building next to Robarts Library is home to U of T's Faculty of Information on the St. George campus (photo by University of Toronto)

Ann Brocklehurst

Topic

Our Community

Convocation 2021

Faculty of Information

Undergraduate Students

The University of Toronto’s first-ever bachelor of information graduates will receive their degrees this month.

In total, 11 students will make up the inaugural cohort of graduates from the Faculty of Information’s two-year-old program, which caters to students from a variety of backgrounds.

One of those grads is Lena Klassen. She originally came to U of T to study computer science, but found it wasn't for her. So, an adviser suggested she try the new program.

Lena Klassen (at right) with her classmates prior to the pandemic
(photo courtesy of Lena Klassen)

“It sounded like a perfect fit for me because of its variety, how it touches on information systems and programming, but also things which I hadn’t explored before like design and policy,” says Klassen, who completed an associate degree in information technology in the United States and worked in the IT industry before attending U of T.

She says she especially enjoyed her design courses and said the program does a good job of communicating and teaching the value of the social sciences, which she says she hadn’t really appreciated before.

The bachelor of information, or “BI,” is a so-called “second entry” program that admits students who have completed their first two years of university in any field.

Students then earn their bachelor’s degree by completing their final two years in the Faculty of Information, taking courses in computational reasoning and information policy and design among others. They also complete a practicum, which gives them hands-on experience in the workplace and the chance to develop professional competencies.

Erxun Ta, an international student from China, came to the program after trying out majors in linguistics, economics and statistics – none of which clicked. She says realized the program reflected her many interests after attending an information session.

Erxun Ta

Ta, who began her studies at the Faculty of Information in the fall of 2019, says she especially appreciated the program’s small class sizes, the sense of camaraderie among students and the attention professors and staff paid to feedback from its inaugural class.

“Whenever we had problems we could reach out to the student services team,” says Ta. “The professors were really caring and thoughtful. The courses were tailored to students.”

While both Ta and Klassen say there remain a few details to be ironed out – the order of required courses, for example – they both say they appreciated that the program was flexible enough to respond to individual students’ personal interests.

Ta, for one, discovered a love of research while completing her degree and plans to return to the Faculty of Information in the fall to complete a master’s degree in user experience design.

She says she’s looking forward to getting back on campus once pandemic restrictions have eased so she can more easily take part informal chats and chance meetings.

For example, Ta says she took a course with Associate Professor Tony Tang and would sometimes run into him in the Bissell Building, leading him to invite her to a reading group with graduate students and to recommend her as a research assistant to one of his doctoral students working on how communications technology in China changed lives during the pandemic.

In 2019, the first cohort of students joined the bachelor of information program in U of T’s Faculty of Information (photo courtesy of Faculty of Information)

Ta, who had originally looked forward to a career in industry, is now contemplating a future in academia.

Klassen, on the other hand, sees the BI as an ideal way to prepare for the certificate she is planning to get in the cybersecurity field after spending the summer with family in Manitoba.

“I think it layers really well,” she says. She adds that the program is ideal “for people who want to work in tech [but] don’t want to be one specific thing.”

'Keep applying and trying': U of T grad on how he landed a full-time job during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 20:44:39 +0000

'Keep applying and trying': U of T grad on how he landed a full-time job during COVID-19

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/24/2020 - 15:44

Cutline

MD Nafizuzzaman, shown here with his wife, is a graduate of U of T's Faculty of Information who landed a sales strategist job with Post Consumer Brands (photo courtesy of MD Nafizuzzaman)

Topic

Faculty of Information

When MD Nafizuzzaman started applying for jobs at the beginning of March, the job market was still fairly normal. Then COVID-19 hit and everything changed as nervous employers put their plans on hold.

But Nafizuzzaman persevered. Graduating with a master's degree in information this fall, the University of Toronto student managed to land a full-time contract position without ever meeting any of his new colleagues in person.

How did he do it? Over a four-week period in the spring, Nafizuzzaman did five online interviews with Post Consumer Brands, which makes Grape Nuts and Frosted Mini Wheats among many other cereals. His interviewers were located all around the world. Thanks to the experience he gained using Blackboard Collaborate and Zoom during the last classes of the winter semester at U of T, Nafizuzzaman says he was confident, if somewhat nervous, about presenting online as part of the process. He was ultimately offered a job as a sales strategist for international business.

“I felt like I could provide the 360-degree answers they wanted,” he says. “Every course that I did, whether it was in my concentration or not, has been a great source of learning and knowledge for me.”

A co-op student in the knowledge management and information management concentration, Nafizuzzaman also took several courses in the user experience design and information systems design concentrations, which he felt prepared him well for the job-hunting process.

In his new role, Nafizuzzaman spends about half his time dealing with information systems and integration of data and the other half looking to increase sales in co-ordination with sales team members in different countries. He draws on his extensive sales and marketing experience that he acquired over almost a decade working in his native Bangladesh, where he earned an undergrad degree in finance and international business.

“I'll be able to apply almost everything I’ve learned at the Faculty of Information,” he says, adding that, as a recent newcomer to Canada, he especially valued his co-op preparation course, which introduced him to Canadian business culture, and his placement at the McCarthy Tétrault law firm, where, among other things, he got to work with some of the firm’s Information system solution providers.

Nafizuzzaman, who moved to Canada with his wife and young son, chose to study at the Faculty of Information for two reasons. “I needed to train myself for the new horizon of data and information, which was something I couldn’t learn on the job,” he says. “And what better way to become Canadian?”

When applying for his new job, he emphasized both his newly acquired information systems knowledge and experience as well as his background in sales. The official offer came through in early May.

Nafizuzzaman, who has been working virtually since his first day on the job, had his first in-person meeting with his manager over pizza and soda on a bench outside the Bissell Building and Robarts Library. Neither he nor his new boss were up for eating at a patio so Nafizuzzaman offered to show her his school as they chatted about work and pandemic life.

Since then he's been to the office twice – once to pick up documents and once to taste some breakfast cereals being sent to customers in Venezuela and Nicaragua. As much as he's enjoying his new job, he misses the personal interactions with colleagues in departments ranging from marketing to supply chain.

On the plus side, working from home made it easier for Nafizuzzaman to complete the final summer course he needed to graduate while adjusting to a new job.

Nafizuzzaman advises fellow grads and job hunters to stick with it. “There are still companies hiring,” he says. “They are creating a lot of roles for people who are tech savvy because of this COVID-19 situation. I would encourage fellow students to keep applying and trying.”

Not even a pandemic could stop Marjorie Douglas, a U of T alumna, from celebrating her 110th birthday

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:16:53 +0000

Not even a pandemic could stop Marjorie Douglas, a U of T alumna, from celebrating her 110th birthday

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 10/23/2020 - 13:16

Cutline

Marjorie Douglas, who graduated in 1932 from what is now U of T's Faculty of Information, recently celebrated her 110th birthday, receiving well wishes from the mayor, premier, prime minister – even the Queen (photo courtesy of the Douglas family)

Topic

Faculty of Information

Trinity College

Marjorie (Richmond) Douglas, an alumna of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information old enough to have lived through the Spanish Flu, recently celebrated her 110^thbirthday with a COVID-19-compliant party. There were no candles, the cake was composed of individual cupcakes and Happy Birthday was recorded in advance instead of performed live. Guests attended in person – at a distance – and on Zoom.

“It's not how anyone would have predicted such an event a few months ago, but it worked,” said her son and U of T alumnus Robert Douglas, describing how on Sept. 13, the morning rain cleared and the sun shone through, allowing masked guests to gather under a marquee tent while a large contingent joined online.

Special guests included Han Dong, a local Member of Parliament, and Shelley Carroll, a local city councillor. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Toronto Mayor John Tory also sent their greetings and, later in the week, congratulatory letters arrived from Governor General Julie Payette, Ontario Premier Doug Ford – even the Queen.

Robert also read aloud letters from U of T President Meric Gertler, Faculty of Information Dean Wendy Duff and Michael Benarroch, president of the University of Manitoba, Marjorie’s other alma mater.

Born in Winnipeg in 1910, Marjorie graduated with a BA from the University of Manitoba in 1931. Encouraged by her mother, she boarded the train to Toronto where the Library School had been established three years earlier. A book lover since childhood, she had a job lined up with the Winnipeg Public Library upon graduation.

A photo of Marjorie Douglas’s graduating class in 1932 at what was then known as the Library School (photo courtesy of U of T Faculty of Information)

Marjorie lived in a women’s boarding house on Madison Avenue, a short walk to her cataloguing and classification classes, which were held at the Ontario College of Education on Bloor Street. In an interview with the faculty’s alumni magazine in 2012, the year she was presented with a U of T Chancellor’s Medal honouring the 80^th anniversary of her graduation, Marjorie talked about her fond memories of Winifred Barnstead, the first director of the Library School and Bertha Bassam, Barnstead’ successor.

She also reminisced about her lasting friendship with classmate Ruth McKenzie showing off a signed copy of her late friend’s best-selling book on Laura Secord. Looking over her old photos, Marjorie was struck by how much more formal clothing was back then. “We wore dresses, nice shoes, and never wore slacks,” she said.

After completing her librarianship diploma in 1932, Marjorie learned that Depression-era cutbacks meant the position she had been promised in Winnipeg had been scaled back to a few hours per week so she wrote to “Miss Barnstead,” as she still called her, for help. She was in luck. Barnstead knew that Trinity College needed a cataloguer who was familiar with the Dewey Decimal System.

Marjorie shortly found herself back at U of T, this time as an employee. While on campus a few years later, she met George Douglas, a Knox College divinity student. They married in 1938 and moved to Niagara Falls where George took his first parish as a Presbyterian minister. Toward the end of the Second World War, Douglas served as a chaplain in the Royal Canadian Navy. After the war, the couple lived in Woodstock, Ont. for 15 years, where Marjorie concentrated on raising her sons George and Robert.

In 1961, her husband was offered the position of Librarian at Knox College on the condition that he get a degree in library science. “My mother used to joke that she enjoyed being able to tell him how to run a library,” said Robert, adding that his father graduated with his master’s degree in library science from Columbia University at age 58.

Looking to resume her career, Marjorie walked into the North York Public Library. After quickly checking with U of T, the library offered her a job on the spot. She worked part-time classifying and cataloguing books until her retirement 13 years later. “By the early 70s, the world was just starting to use computers – just as I was retiring,” she said. “We used white ink on the spine to record the book’s numbers using the Dewey System.”

Marjorie, whose husband died in 1990, credits her longevity to good genes, noting that her mother lived well into her nineties. Her 101-year-old brother Dick Richmond, a retired aeronautical engineer, regularly visits his sister and was named to the Order of Canada earlier this year. He was on hand to propose the champagne toast at her birthday party.

At her retirement residence, Marjorie kept active well into her 11th decade, participating in organized activities, regularly attending “sit and be fit” classes, playing bridge and earning the nickname “Queen of Scrabble.” She sees Robert, who lives in Toronto, regularly, and George and his family, who live in Kanata Ont., as much as possible. Marjorie has a grandson, granddaughter, four great grandsons and one great granddaughter. “Every day is a gift,” she said in her 2012 interview. “I’m thankful for that. I feel that you have to keep your mind vital and mentally active.”

The strict isolation under COVID-19 confined Marjorie to her suite for several months and restricted visits from family. No residents have contacted the virus to date, but the inability to walk outside her suite has reduced Marjorie’s mobility and she has had to replace her walker with a wheelchair. Her concentration and short-term memory are also not as keen as they used to be.

In spite of these constraints, Robert says his mother greatly enjoyed her birthday party and the chance to talk one-on-one to guests both in person and online. “We were really happy at how she rose to the occasion,” he said.

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:32:09 +0000

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 07/30/2020 - 09:32

Cutline

An undated photo of Emancipation Day celebrations in Windsor Ont., which once drew figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and musical acts like the Supremes (photo courtesy E. Andrea Moore Heritage Collection/Essex County Black Historical Research Society)

Topic

Faculty of Information

Museum Studies

Royal Ontario Museum

Before COVID-19 struck, the city of Windsor, Ont. was looking forward to its biggest Emancipation Day celebrations in recent years on Aug. 1. And, thanks to the efforts of local history buffs, it was well on its way to bringing back an event that recalled the days when Windsor attracted famous civil rights activists and Motown stars to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in most of the British colonies in 1834.

The history – and recent revival – of Windsor’s Emancipation Day is being closely followed by Tonya Sutherland, who graduated from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in museum studies this year. Building on research for her 2018 capstone project, Sutherland and two other women from the Toronto area – retired teacher Catherine MacDonald and actor and producer Audra Gray – sought to bring this chapter of Black Canadian history to a wider audience.

In the 1950s and early1960s, hundreds of thousands of people would arrive in Windsor for the multi-day festivities that took place the first weekend in August. They heard from figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt – and watched the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations, who crossed the Detroit River to perform at Windsor’s Jackson Park. But by the late 1960s, Windsor’s Emancipation Day festivities had begun to lose steam.

“These celebrations were some of the biggest in North America, but they didn’t remain in people’s consciousness,” says Sutherland. “It’s a bit of a shame how they’ve been mostly forgotten.”

But efforts are underway to make Emancipation Day a big deal again. When Windsor’s Emancipation Day Committee announced it was cancelling this year’s events, it also said it was planning for an significant event in 2021.

In the meantime, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto will mark Emancipation Day with a special ROM Connects talk moderated by Sutherland on Aug. 5, which follows an earlier talk given this month.

Working under the umbrella of the Jackson Park Project, named for the park where the Emancipation Day celebrations were held in Windsor, Sutherland’s goal is to create a digital archive of historical material.

As for Sutherland’s partners in the project, MacDonald is aiming to create educational resources for use in classrooms that would be hosted by the digital archive while Gray wants to produce a drama television series based on the annual festivities as well as a documentary. The documentary would chronicle both the team’s behind-the-scenes journey and a proposal before Parliament to formally recognize Emancipation Day nationally (Ontario officially recognized the day in 2008).

“Audra was watching TV one day and came across this documentary, The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth. It was a larger history of Emancipation Day, somewhat focused on Windsor, but with a broader view,” says Sutherland. “She wondered why she had never heard of it.”

Thinking it a story worth dramatizing, Gray linked up with MacDonald, her former teacher who was also interested in Canada’s Black history. MacDonald’s husband mentioned the project to his co-worker, Sutherland’s father, who in turn told his daughter about it.

“I tend to get really invested in the personal element of history,” says Sutherland who also earned an undergraduate degree in English and history from U of T in 2016. That interest caused her friends to suggest she might want to check out the Faculty of Information’s museum studies program. The idea resonated with Sutherland, who had also been inspired watching the TV program Mysteries at the Museum.

During their first research trip to Windsor in 2018, Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray spent a week researching and filming. Irene Moore Davis, president of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, shared a wealth of information with the visitors. “While we say this is a history that’s not known to a broader audience, people from Windsor – whose families were involved – are very aware,” says Sutherland. “Irene has been really key to our project because she has quite a large collection of family history including boxes of documents. Her family was very involved in Emancipation Day.”

While in Windsor, Sutherland visited the University of Windsor archives, looked at hundreds of photographs and examined the programs printed annually, which typically included a letter from the mayor of Windsor and sometimes featured messages from prominent speakers. “From magazines, you could see who was buying ad space and supporting the celebrations,” she says, adding that the documents helped with her primary research.

Sutherland digitized the materials as part of her capstone project with the goal of creating a permanent digital archive. “I’ve learned all the things that go into creating an archive and a digital archive,” she says. “The more I learn, the more it teaches me what I don’t know.”

That also goes for Black Canadian history, says Sutherland, who adds that Canadians often don’t know what became of the people who arrived in places like Windsor via the Underground Railroad. “Was everything amazing? Did they face racism and struggle?”

The holes in our knowledge “speak to a larger unknowing,” she says. “This whole thing has been extremely eye-opening to me.”

MacDonald says the history of Windsor’s Emancipation Day is a perfect subject for teaching because it is so multi-faceted. “It’s the story of Canada and the Black diaspora. It’s the story of English and French, and the story of Canada and the U.S. It’s the story of two cities.”

Black families were often divided between Detroit and Windsor with cousins walking across the frozen Detroit River in winter and holding large family get-togethers at Emancipation Day events in the summer. A Detroit historian, Kimberly Simmons, has spent more than a decade trying to get the Detroit River declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for the role it played in the underground railroad.

Meanwhile Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray continue to move forward on their Windsor projects. The teaser for Gray’s documentary debuted last summer at Emancipation Day. MacDonald is working with local Black educators, members of Windsor’s Black historical society and the Ontario Black History Society to produce lesson plans. And Sutherland has produced a digital archive feasibility report as her capstone project in museum studies.

In some ways, the work they are doing emulates that done almost a century ago by Windsor citizens. In 1932, they, too, decided that they wanted to build up their small Emancipation Day celebrations into a much bigger event – and eventually turned their vision into reality.

Despite COVID-19, the work behind the scenes on bringing Emancipation Day to a wider audience continues. “We’re now trying to seek out and establish viable and more stable sources of funding,” Sutherland says.

A pager-free zone: U of T startup Hypercare aims to bring hospitals into the 21st century

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 13:45:52 +0000

A pager-free zone: U of T startup Hypercare aims to bring hospitals into the 21st century

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 12/16/2019 - 08:45

Cutline

Hypercare, co-founded by U of T alumnus Albert Tai, is a communications and collaboration app that caters to the unique needs of the health-care sector, where outdated technologies like pagers and fax machines are still common (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Topic

Faculty of Information

Faculty of Medicine

Startups

University Health Network

UTEST

The first thing you see when you go to the website of Hypercare, the startup co-founded by University of Toronto alumnus Albert Tai, is its sales pitch to health-care administrators: “No more pagers. No more phone tag.”

Tai says people who don’t work in the health-care sector are often stunned to find out that the old-fashioned pager remains ubiquitous in hospitals.

“There’s a joke about it,” he says. “It used to be only doctors and drug dealers using pagers. Now it’s just doctors.”

The omnipresent pager is but one symptom of how the health-care sector is behind the times, according to Tai. Other symptoms include the ongoing use of fax machines and dependency on old-fashioned call centres within the hospital to track down doctors on call. “Everyone knows health care is lagging usually 10 or 15 years behind every other industry,” says Tai, who completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science and medical science before enrolling at U of T’s Faculty of Information in 2015.

Tai, who often has two phones and a laptop on the go, says he was bewildered to see doctors using even more devices – sometimes as many as five different pagers. And he learned that when they improvised solutions to get around the pager system – using WhatsApp for group chats, for example – it raised privacy concerns and patient confidentiality issues.

Hypercare, by contrast, aims to bring physicians firmly into the mobile age with a communication and collaboration tool. The app’s users know instantly who the on-call doctors and specialists are without having to call the hospital switchboard, arrange a page and play telephone tag. The software incorporates corporate directory and shift information. Hypercare’s goal is to allow the phasing out of pagers, fax machines and even email.

Obstacles to innovation in health care include the sector’s complexity, an aversion to risk, extensive regulation and the built-in disincentives to economic efficiency that exist in a publicly funded system, Tai says. On the bright side, the fact that there are still so many problems to be solved means there are plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs.

“It’s one of the last industries where you don’t have to be very creative because there are still so many problems … every single way it’s done now is terrible,” Tai says.

The project that eventually became Hypercare began in a computer course Tai took as part of his master’s degree in information systems and design. Students were tasked with coming up with an idea to solve a problem in the health-care sector, and then developing a business plan and prototype.

Tai’s team was connected to three physician mentors. Robert Wu, the site director of general internal medicine at Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN), helped them understand the problem from the administrative end, according to Tai, while doctors Allan Martin and Matt Strickland explained the pain points from their perspective as front-end providers.

“We quickly realized that, along with WhatsApp not having the security or privacy features required in health care, it also didn’t address the bigger problem of connecting with other providers outside of your team to provide collaborative care.”

As he completed his degree and then after he graduated in 2017, Tai remained committed to finding a way to solve the pager problem. He teamed up with Dr. Joseph Choi, an emergency physician at UHN and an assistant professor in U of T’s department of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine who is now Hypercare’s chief operating officer. Tai, meanwhile, devoted himself to the startup full time, using funds from small grants, including one for $37,000 from the Ontario Centres of Excellence, to bring on some part-time employees.

The startup, which now has seven full-time and two part-time employees, was given space at U of T in a startup incubator housed in a deconsecrated church. The U of T Early Stage Technology (UTEST) program provided helpful mentoring advice. Tai also credits the “system-level perspective” he acquired at the Faculty of Information for helping him run Hypercare.

When money was at its tightest, Tai was occasionally forced to sleep in the office. But the pressure eased when Hypercare landed $500,000 in funding from U.S. angel investors in 2018. Then, in February of this year, the startup secured its first paying customer: the ophthalmology department at Queen’s University. Not long after, Hypercare closed its first hospital-wide deal with the Michael Garron Hospital, formerly known as Toronto East General Hospital.

Given the magnitude of the hospital pager problem, Tai was not surprised to learn early on that there had already been several attempts at trying to solve it. American companies like Vocera Communications and Spok complemented existing pager systems with their own apps, but faced low adoption from clinicians as the early implementations were often fraught with problems, says Tai. In many cases, hospitals layered the new technology on top of the old, using multiple software systems and devices. While the biggest of the companies have hundreds of millions in revenues, there hasn’t really been a dominant player to emerge in the field.

Tai says things really started to pick up for Hypercare began to integrate hospitals’ on-call schedules into their proposed software solution. “Now we have a comprehensive solution. That’s what’s been exciting the hospitals,” says Tai. “It’s all real time. The switchboard operator can use it and clinicians can also use it without calling the switchboard.” What’s more, unlike the current practice at many hospitals, when scheduling changes are made, everyone will be aware of them.

Hypercare was one of three companies to pitch to the Michael Garron Hospital. Based on that and positive word of mouth from local doctors, it was chosen to do a small pilot which proved a success. That led to an enterprise-wide adoption of the platform, which is expected to be widely deployed in the coming months.

Hypercare is also being used by seven health-care organizations in Kitchener and Cambridge, Ont.

Craig Albrecht, a family physician who leads the Cambridge interprofessional care team, a multidisciplinary group of doctors, nurses, social workers and outreach workers who provide community care and services, says the team deals with a relatively high concentration of patients suffering from poverty, housing insecurity, substance use disorders and mental health issues.

“We have a lot of people who are always on the move and can disappear for weeks or months at a time,” Albrecht says. “This makes co-ordinating services and providing care for them in the usual way very difficult.”

Transitioning to Hypercare has made co-ordinating with both interprofessional care team and other external teams much simpler, adds Tai.

Hypercare hopes to win additional hospital-wide contracts as its reputation grows. While his parents wanted him to be a doctor or pharmacist, Tai’s passion was always technology. He says he has no interest in orchestrating a profitable “exit” by selling the company he co-founded. Instead, he aspires to be the “Microsoft of health care” by systematically replacing inefficient hospital software with better products and systems.

“The work is very motivating,” says Tai, “because the clinicians are smart, passionate and there for the right reasons – to make patient care better.”