In addition to our platform and the articles it disseminates, Érudit is a digital infrastructure whose wide range of services helps support open scholarly publishing in Canada. But what does that mean, concretely?
We are entering the month of May, which means a new edition of “The Team Behind Érudit” is coming to life. This series aims to introduce some of the members who make up our organization and the work they carry out on a daily basis. This month, get to know Audrey Larivière, our cheerful data analyst!
How Would You Describe Your Role at Érudit?
My role at Érudit consists of ensuring that data is recorded and structured in a way that optimizes the discoverability and accessibility of the articles we disseminate. I make sure that our various tools account for changes made to the data structure.
If you asked my colleagues, there’s a good chance the answer “laughing loudly, often” would come up a lot — but that’s another story…
What does a typical workday look like for you?
I nurture my obsession with tickets: I open tickets, I ask colleagues to open tickets, I describe tickets, I assign tickets, I comment on tickets, I complete the work requested in tickets, I submit merge requests to close tickets, I close tickets…
What is a ticket? It is a unit of work. A ticket can be broken down into tasks to divide up the work to be done. Multiple tickets can also be grouped together as an epic (no less!) to create a coherent body of work within a project, for example.
In short, I organize work so that, on one hand, it can be completed more efficiently, and on the other, information on the status of ongoing work stays up to date so that anyone on the Érudit team can check the progress of tasks.
I also obviously write a few lines of code. Within the technological infrastructure team, all development work is reviewed by at least one person before being merged into the existing codebase through a process called code review. This practice allows us to catch errors and awkward solutions and correct them before deploying to production. It also pushes us to stay informed about the evolution of our work, which makes us more efficient when we eventually need to intervene.
What recent project you contributed to are you particularly proud of?
Since we want to enrich the articles we disseminate with new metadata, we tend to increase the frequency of updates to our Érudit Article XML schema. I put in place a workflow, from analysis to schema publication, to streamline modifications and identify potential issues as early as possible. We improve our methods by learning from each change.
What was your path before joining Érudit?
I first completed a cumulative bachelor’s degree combining programs in archival studies, digital information management, and cognitive sciences, before going on to complete a master’s degree in information science. I then worked with data processing pipelines, primarily in XML, at a private company. That job in the field led me toward a bachelor’s degree in computer science and software engineering. Upon completing that program, I worked as a university librarian in digital projects for a year before joining Érudit in 2022. There I found what matters most to me: data, computing, collaboration, and a concern for users.
Before we let you go, can you recommend one or two articles from our platform that particularly resonate with you?
I am fascinated by timbre — essentially what characterizes a sound beyond its other specific attributes. I recommend “La notation du timbre instrumental : noter la cause ou l’effet dans le rapport geste-son” by Caroline Traube, a professor at the Faculty of Music at the Université de Montréal who has both an engineering background and a musical one. I had the chance to benefit from that interdisciplinarity in her teaching.
I would also highlight “Vers une classification des timbres instrumentaux pour l’analyse et la création” by Victor Cordero and Kit Soden, to satisfy the librarian in me who always finds new things to classify.