What鈥檚 it like to search the universe for new discoveries or practice potentially life-saving nursing skills? Visit the Allan I. Carswell Astronomical Observatory, the Nursing Simulation Centre and the Archives of Ontario at 91亚色鈥檚 Keele Campus during Toronto鈥檚 Doors Open event to find out.

All three venues will be open Saturday, May 24, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. They all offer interactive activities in line with this year鈥檚 theme of play, along with an educational aspect. Admission is free for all visitors.

Allan I. Carswell Astronomical Observatory

Opened in 1969, the has two telescopes housed in new dual, rotating, robotic domes, which replaced the original ones in 2022.

Under one of the domes is a one-metre (39-inch) custom-built telescope 鈥� the largest on a university campus in Canada 鈥� installed in 2019 to provide students, researchers and the community with a deeper view into the mysteries of space, distant galaxies and cosmic objects. Beneath the second dome, is a 60-centimetre (24-inch) Cassegrain reflector.

鈥淏oth telescopes help transport viewers to a universe of possibilities and unknowns where they can explore galaxies and solar systems beyond our own,鈥� says 91亚色 Professor Elaina Hyde, director of the observatory. 鈥淭elescopes do make the best spaceships.鈥�

Visitors to the observatory will have an opportunity to speak with astronomy students, learn what it means to be an astronomer, find out about the latest research and discoveries. There will be guided tours of the building, along with a special Observatory Treasure Hunt.

Smaller portable telescopes will be available for visitor use, weather permitting.

Who doesn't love space? It captures our imaginations and makes us wonder if we are truly alone. This is a great Doors Open option for young visitors and the young at heart.

Visitors should note that there are dim light conditions and stairs-only access (unfortunately no lifts or ramps are available) in the observatory and sturdy close-toed shoes are recommended.

Last admittance will be at 4:30 p.m.

To learn more, check out the observatory website.

Nursing Simulation Centre

There will be many opportunities for visitors to interact with the equipment in the and can see if they have what it takes to be a health-care professional.

Opened in 2006, the centre is a 5,000-square-foot space on the third floor of the Health, Nursing and Environmental Studies building. It includes the Nursing Skills Lab, which houses adult medical-surgical beds, a pediatric area and an isolation room.

鈥淭he Nursing Simulation Centre allows students to hone and practice their skills in a controlled and simulated environment, so they are ready to apply what they learned in real-life situations,鈥� says 91亚色 Assistant Professor Laura Nicholson, director of the centre. 鈥淎 portion of the centre is set up to resemble a hospital ward where students get hands-on experience administering medical care using anatomically correct mannequins.鈥�

Students in 91亚色's undergraduate and graduate nursing programs are provided the opportunity to achieve their professional development and learning goals.

Interested in knowing more? Explore the centre through tours and ask questions of the knowledgeable volunteers who can explain how the equipment works.

Last admittance will be at 4:45 p.m.

To learn more, check out the Nursing Simulation Centre鈥檚 website.

The Archives of Ontario

If you have ever wondered what鈥檚 inside the Archives of Ontario, now is your chance to check it out.

Visitors to the Archives can partake in a custom scavenger hunt game where they will transform into investigative journalists to uncover a fiendishly fictional plot through hands-on activities.

In the main ground floor space 鈥� the Reading Room 鈥� there will be two new exhibits. 鈥溾�� shares personal stories documenting the rich Black histories that have shaped contemporary Toronto. 鈥淏鈥橪ACK THEN: Muted Melodies鈥�, curated by the , showcases incredible untold stories in Ontario Black music history.

Plus, visitors can go behind-the-scenes and take part in a guided tour of the storage vaults and preservation services laboratory.

If that鈥檚 not enough 鈥減lay,鈥� steelpan musician Pat McNeilly, known as Pan Man Pat, will be playing three 30-minute presentations. The Trinidadian born steelpan teacher was an instrumental figure in its establishment in Toronto schools and has been performing at the Toronto Caribbean Carnival (formerly Caribana) since its 1967 founding.

The tours will run every 30-minutes until 4pm. The steel pan presentations will be at noon, 2pm and 4pm.

Last admittance will be at 4 p.m.

For more information, visit the webpage.

The Goldfarb Gallery

Visitors also have an opportunity to take in some art while on campus.

While not on the official Doors Open tour, the is now in its new butterfly-shaped building featuring three exhibition spaces plus a performance pavilion designed by internationally acclaimed architect Siamak Hariri. Its central reception area connects four uniquely designed 鈥渨ings鈥�.

The gallery will be open to visitors on Saturday, May 24, from noon to 5 p.m., and is a short stroll from the 91亚色 subway station.

Two new exhibits will be will be open for viewing until Aug. 2: Tu岷 Andrew Nguy峄卬鈥檚 and Andrea Carlson鈥檚 .

Nguy峄卬鈥檚 exhibit began with the Luf Boat, a massive and elaborately carved outrigger sailing vessel from the island of Luf, Papua New Guinea, made in the late 1800s. The canoe was confiscated by the Hernsheim trading company and sold to the German ethnographic museum in 1904.  A main aspect of Nguy峄卬鈥檚 exhibition is reuniting descendants of the people of Luf with the canoe while questioning the colonial history of theft and violence that brought it to its current site at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

Carlson鈥檚 exhibit builds on concerns that have animated her more than two-decade long practice. The exhibition鈥檚 title is a play on the poem The Sonnet, 1880, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that includes the line 鈥淎 Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals/The soul,鈥攊ts converse, to what Power 鈥檛is due鈥︹��.  

There will also be a public conversation in a separate gallery room with artistTu岷 Andrew Nguy峄卬, moderated by gallery Director/Curator Jenifer Papararo, from 2 to 4 p.m., which will include Stanley Inum, Fordy Stanley and Enoch Lun from Papua New Guinea with translator Kireni Imwe Jean Sparks-Ngenge. to attend the conversation.

Admittance to the gallery is always free. See location on the .

TRCA Administrative Office

Also, in the neighbourhood is the 鈥檚 (TRCA) new administrative office building. Recently, the TRCA unveiled a brand-new building bringing together cutting-edge sustainability design and practice in one unique structure. Learn more about the 8,100-square-metre, mass timber construction building and how it integrates nature, energy efficiency, and cutting-edge design.

Highlights of the building design include cascading water walls and a large, naturally lit atrium, which provides stunning views of the adjacent Black Creek ravine. TRCA's new office 鈥� next to 91亚色鈥檚 Keele Campus 鈥� is one of the most sustainable buildings in North America. It reimagines how green building design in an urban landscape can playfully integrate with the natural environment.

The TRCA administrative office will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, May 24 and Sunday, May 25. Last admittance will be at 4:45 p.m. on both days.

The Village at Black Creek

For more than 60 years, has been a destination for Torontonians to explore the past and reflect on the present. This exploration is made meaningful by its 40 historic buildings, 60 rare- and heritage-breed animals, six gardens growing flowers and plants from heirloom seeds, and one-of-a-kind programs that engage people of all ages.

Visitors meet costumed historians who involve them in trades and crafts common to 1860s Ontario. Home to some of the oldest buildings in the Greater Toronto Area, including the 1816 Stong family home, and a collection of 50,000 19th-century artifacts, The Village at Black Creek is a department of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

The Village at Black Creek will be open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 24 and Sunday, May 25. Last admittance will be at 3:30 p.m. on both days.

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For those interested in visiting some of the other 150 plus sites across Toronto, including sports, music and theatre venues, visit the website.

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TORONTO, June 29, 2017 鈭� The University of Waterloo and 91亚色 have been awarded a grant from the to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past.

The grant, valued at $610,625, supports Archives Unleashed, a project that will develop web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars and librarians to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web. It is additionally supported by generous in-kind and financial contributions from Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, 91亚色 Libraries and the University of Waterloo鈥檚 Faculty of Arts.听听听

鈥淲e want to unleash web archive collections by allowing scholars and curators to systematically filter, aggregate, analyze, and visualize content,鈥� says Professor, the project lead and expert in digital history at the University of Waterloo鈥檚 Department of History. 鈥淭he sheer volume of cultural information generated online over the past 20 years presents exciting opportunities for historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other scholars.鈥�

, digital assets librarian at 91亚色 and lead developer on the projects, says it will be a sea change for digital historians. 鈥淭he systems we are building will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students, researchers, librarians and archivists to use web archives in their work,鈥� says Ruest. 鈥淚t is absolutely critical that these systems exist so that more researchers can truly examine this abundance of web archival data.鈥�

The Internet Archive is a San Francisco non-profit that started in 1996 and currently holds over 30,000 terabytes or 30 petabytes of archival content, a staggering amount of online data that continues to grow exponentially. While public institutions such as university libraries work with the Internet Archive to collect websites of institutional or researcher interest, the current tools for web archive searches are difficult for most people to use and often require prior knowledge of a specific URL, explains Milligan. 鈥淪cholars send a request for archival data and get file formats they may not understand. For many, it鈥檚 a very slow page-by-page search. So the barriers to entry in this field of digital history are really high.鈥�

Accessing and analyzing large web archives are currently prohibitive challenges for most researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Milligan and his co-Principal Investigators, Ruest and Professor and David R. Cheriton Chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, aim to change this.

The three-year Archives Unleashed project has three major thrusts: First, the project will build a software toolkit that applies modern big data analytics infrastructure to scholarly analysis of web archives. Second, the toolkit will be deployed in a cloud-based environment that will provide a one-stop portal for scholars to ingest their collections and execute a number of analyses with the click of a mouse. Finally, datathons 鈥� or hackathons 鈥� will build a cohesive and sustainable user community by bringing the core project team members together with librarians, archivists, and other interested researchers.

Explains Professor Lin, 鈥淭he only way to handle the immense size of typical web archives is to distribute processing tasks over computer clusters. For companies such as Google and Facebook, such infrastructure is taken for granted by legions of data scientists. One of the goals of this project is to bring these capabilities into the hands of historians and other humanities scholars.鈥� The project aims to build on the Apache Spark data processing platform; and, in turn, all tools developed by the project will be released under an open-source licence and shared with the community.

Ultimately, scholarly analyses will feed into visualizations that allow researchers to interactively explore the data 鈥� for example, the network of hyperlinks between sites. 鈥淣etwork visualizations will help you see what kind of news outlets a political party tended to link to from their website during the last election,鈥� says Milligan. 鈥淥r, every time the Conservatives talked about Justin Trudeau, you can find out what kinds of words and adjectives they used.鈥�

Ruest will focus on a full-stack implementation, building the canonical cloud implementation, ensuring the system is secure, and designing the interface for both data contributors and users.

The project will also seek to expand partnerships with institutions such as universities and government departments. 鈥淲e really want to enable Canadian partners to take their rich library collections and make them accessible 鈥� searchable, with downloadable data and ways to interactively explore the content,鈥� says Milligan. 鈥淚n the next decades, more historians, librarians, legal researchers, political scientists, sociologists 鈥� anyone who wants to work with big data sets 鈥� will benefit from this project in being able to unleash their web archives.鈥�

91亚色 is known for championing new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-discipline programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91亚色 students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world鈥檚 most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91亚色 U is an internationally recognized research university 鈥� our 11 faculties and 26 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91亚色 is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 295,000 alumni. 91亚色 U's fully bilingual Glendon campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contacts
Janice Walls, Media Relations, 91亚色, 416 455 4710, wallsj@yorku.ca

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