Mission Statement

Our Mission

LINCS enables Canadian researchers to create interlinked and contextualized online data about culture to benefit scholars and the public.

LINCS’s mission is to make cultural data more readily available, shareable, searchable, and reusable.

It is committed to: (1) empowering researchers to link their data; (2) hosting linked datasets; (3) providing tools for creating, querying, filtering, visualizing, sharing, annotating, and refining linked data; and (4) prioritizing voices and communities that are underrepresented on the Web with a view to promoting equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Our Commitment to Access

LINCS is committed to free and open access. Wherever possible, LINCS materials are licensed to encourage reuse: software and code under an open-source license and data under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0). LINCS is committed to the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and respects the sovereignty of Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge.

Our Commitment to Acknowledgement

LINCS is committed to recognizing the work of all of its contributors. All kinds of work are equally deserving of credit.

Our Commitment to Sustainability

LINCS is committed to the ongoing accessibility, sustainable management, and long-term preservation of its data. LINCS aims to ensure that its system and the data it hosts are maintained sustainably. We recognize that sustainability is not a metaphor: it consumes human labour as well as material resources, which are our responsibility to steward.

Our Commitment to Equity

LINCS is committed to diversity, inclusion, and decolonization in all areas of the project: from dataset selection to resource access and allocation; from community involvement to team composition. LINCS’s ongoing work to enact reconciliation and anti-racism is more than just a policy: it is an ongoing commitment to listen, learn, engage, and take concrete action to dismantle discrimination.

LINCS is committed to representing difference and diversity, including non-hegemonic epistemologies and alternative knowledge representations. LINCS seeks to address systemic bias through its handling and presentation of data, by promoting situated and contextually embedded data, and via transparency about how LINCS datasets are culturally produced.

LINCS is committed to equity among its participants. The LINCS Project Charter outlines project-wide values and practices for preserving mutual respect and fostering goodwill.

Document Details

Version: 1.0

Authors: Susan Brown, Sarah Roger, Kim Martin, Pieter Botha

Last Updated: 2024-02-16

Released: 2023-03-04