GLAM/Newsletter/July 2019/Contents/Map the GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue VII, July 2019

Map the GLAM report

Visualising the status and the spread of a cultural collection in Wikipedia

Map the GLAM is part of a PhD thesis focusing on cultural content aggregators, such as Wikimedia Commons. The thesis aims to discover interface characteristics that may foster the access and usage of digital images released under open licenses by GLAMs. The project has two main goals. On the one hand, it tries to define a set of visual representations to analyse the status and the spread of a digitised collection in Wikipedia and its sister projects. On the other hand, it tries to identify usability issues that hinder the access and usage use of digital images.

Map the GLAM is a project by Giovanni Profeta. It is developed within DensityDesign research lab in the framework of the PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano, with the support of the Laboratory of visual culture SUPSI.

Visual analysis

In a preliminary phase, a map of GLAMs contributing to Wikimedia Commons was made to select a specific cultural institution to be analysed. Among them, ETH Library was selected because it is one of the leading cultural institutions in terms of files uploaded in Wikimedia Commons. Then a set of visualisations was made after gathering data from the Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia API. The visualisations show the following metrics: the frequency of the contribution, the images' size, the images' spread over Wikimedia projects, the daily page views of pages containing ETH Library images and the position of ETH Library images within Wikipedia pages.

Map of the libraries contributing to Wikimedia Commons.
Timeline of ETH Library images in Wikimedia Commons.
Chart of the physical and digital size of ETH Library images.
Chart of the daily page views of Wikipedia and Commons pages containing collection images.
Chart of the average position of ETH Library images within Wikipedia pages.

The data visualisations have made visible the vast extension of the ETH collection regarding time, authors and mediums. Over the period 2016—2018, 8.800 users contributed to add around 1.000 images in more than 1.000 Wikipedia pages. The most used images portray intellectuals and other famous people but also aerial views of cities. The pages that mainly feature ETH images are pages about European and African cities.

Design project

GLAM Culture Hub is an interactive mockup of a digital archive collecting digitised items coming from multiple GLAMs. It was designed after the visual analysis of ETH Library's images over Wikimedia projects. The goal of GLAM Culture Hub is to evaluate, through an online survey, interface characteristics that may foster the access and usage of digital images within cultural content aggregators.

The evaluation phase is still in progress. If you would like to contribute to the research, after watching the video demo or navigating the interactive prototype, you can fill in the survey. The survey will take 10 minutes to complete.

N.B.: the interactive prototype consists of static images with the addition of some sensible areas; thus, functions cannot be performed.

> Survey on the GLAM Culture Hub interface