GLAM/Newsletter/February 2019/Contents/USA report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue II, February 2019

USA report

Black History Month, Wikidata Game & Women's History Month

New Open Knowledge Coordinator Role at the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Institution has been awarded a Wikimedia project grant to jointly fund an Open Knowledge Coordinator that melds Wikimedia digital strategy and gender equity in a GLAM setting. Under the Smithsonian's American Women's History Initiative the effort is committed to increasing representation of women from its collections. Kelly Doyle will serve as the Smithsonian Open Knowledge Coordinator to help increase the visibility of women on Wikimedia projects and create campaigns and events for engagement while working internally with staff around Wikimedia. Kelly was previously Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity at West Virginia University and is currently a board member of Wikimedia DC.

The project is currently looking for interested GLAM partners who want to be involved with specific topic areas that relate to gender and are excited to create new partnerships! Please contact Effie Kapsalis (User:Digitaleffie) or Kelly Doyle (User:KellyDoyle) for more information.

Artificial intelligence generating Wikidata suggestions: Wikimedia, The Met Museum and Microsoft

As reported last month, The Metropolitan Museum of Art worked with Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) and Microsoft Research to demonstrate the “Tag, That’s It!” project which uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to suggest depiction metadata to be added to Wikidata items about artworks.

Wikidata Game - Depiction example: An artificial intelligence/image recognition engine "thinks" there is a horse in the artwork. Volunteers can help confirm or reject that suggestion.

The AI-generated suggestions are impressive but need humans for final determination. Therefore, the depiction statements are fed to the Wikidata Distributed Game where Wikimedians help determine whether paintings actually do depict a horse, house, flower or boat, among other items. Wikimedians are invited to play the game right now, at the Wikidata Distributed Game.

Wikidata Game - Depiction stats for March 2019. One of the most popular games in the first week of March (purple line).

Since the beginning of March, it has been one of the most widely played games on the site, with more than 7,000 "judgments" so far. In fact, the queue of possible depicts statements have been exhausted several times, so artworks from other museums are now being processed. In the past week, work from the Rijksmuseum, Flemish art collections and Yale Center for British Art have been added to the game. So far, the project is focusing on paintings, and requires Wikidata items for the artworks and images in Commons.

Contact Andrew Lih if you have any special requests or projects to be added. He has written a detailed blog post for The Met Museum detailing how the project works and future plans. (Lih, Andrew. "Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale," Now at the Met, The Met Museum, March 4, 2019 [link])

Press coverage of the project includes:

Black Lunch Table/SIM February 2019

Staten Island Museum at Snug Harbor, and Black Lunch Table held a meetup, Black Lunch Table/SIM FEB 19

Black Lunch Table/BMCC February 2019

Borough of Manhattan Community College and Black Lunch Table held a meetup, Black Lunch Table/BMCC FEB 2019

Prelinger Library Wiki-a-thon

Prelinger Library, San Francisco, and Bay Area Wiki-Salon held a meetup, Prelinger Library Wiki-a-thon, about their collection of 19th and 20th century historical ephemera, and zines.

Special Libraries Association

February's monthly Special Libraries Association's Education Division webinar featured Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight presenting on "Wikipedia editing and gender gaps".