GLAM/Newsletter/June 2024/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue VI, June 2024

Brazil report

Wiki Loves Mato Grosso

By Sandra Soster, Milienne Paixão & Juliana Cunha

Wiki Loves Mato Grosso is an initiative organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB), with support from the Wikimedia Foundation. It aims to highlight Mato Grosso's cultural, historical, and natural heritage on Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia in Portuguese. In 2024, Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) will mobilize volunteer editors, institutional partners and Mato Grosso communities to improve coverage of Mato Grosso on the free internet! And GLAM institutions are important partners for filling in the image and content gaps.

Knowledge gap

Mato Grosso is the third largest state of Brazil. It is part of the Center-West region and it contains 142 municipalities. In its capital Cuiabá is located the Geodesic Center of South America. Its territory is covered by three types of biomes: Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado. And what to say about Chapada dos Guimarães National Park and its rugged terrain with dramatic cliffs and waterfalls...

The cultural diversity of this State was built by Pantanal's riverine, quilombola and indigenous peoples; expressed in arts, mythology, dances (such as lambadão cuiabano, siriri and cururu), and gastronomy (such as the Maria Isabel, banana farofa, chicken stew and the famous baguncinha burger - which has become intangible heritage of Cuiabá).

Despite of its importance, only 46 municipalities have one or more images on Wikimedia Commons; only 7 of the 110 assets listed by IPHAN have Wikipedia articles. Mato Grosso is definitely one of the most underrepresented Brazilian states on Wikimedia platforms.

New partner in Mato Grosso

We are happy to announce our first GLAM-Wiki partnership for Wiki Loves Mato Grosso campaign: Acervo de Literatura Digital Mato-Grossense (ALDMT). This project maps digital literature produced by authors born in the State of Mato Grosso. The collection shows how computer technologies and media have been creatively appropriated by them, being "a sample of how Mato Grosso's prose and poetry are gaining new contours on the Internet". This partnership will upload metadata about artists from Mato Grosso on Wikidata.

This GLAM-Wiki partnership in Mato Grosso will help us to fill some knowledge gaps and are part of the activities relates to two axes of WMB's strategic planning to be implemented between 2023 and 2025:

Foster and diversify partnerships for open knowledge in Brazil
Expand the list of collaborations within cultural and educational institutions, activist groupss, government entities and open knowledge organizations, spread throughout the different regions of Brazil.
Promote knowledge equity
Articulate individuals and groups to act on knowledge gaps or on the systemic bias in the content of Wikimedia projects.

See the ALDMT' GLAM page.

Other editions

Wikidata Workshop - Optimizing the visualization of collections with queries

On June 6ht, our Products and Technology manager, Éder Porto, presented a workshop to 30 attendents on how to use Wikidata to explore and visualize collections efficiently. The objectives were to learn how to build Wikidata queries and different visualization formats. Attendents were presented to Wikidata main concepts and to Wikidata Query Service.

This activity is part of our partnership with the Library of the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo.

You may see some interesting visualization of collections with queries on Museu Paulista's GLAM page as the one presented below: Type of works in each collection of the Museu Paulista.

See the slides from the workshop.

See the Libraries at USP's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

"Celebrating is Resisting" Photowalk

On June 13, 2024, the Biblioteca Escolar Municipal do Dique - José Lins do Rego, in partnership with Wiki Movimento Brasil, organized an event for its community: the Celebrating is Resisting Photowalk. This event was the main activity to celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the library, located in the Jardim América, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The event aimed to encourage children who frequent the library to document their neighborhood, which, before the photowalking, had only nine images on Wikimedia Commons and none of the library. The activity also marked the restructuring of the reading space, which, after being affected by a flood in January 2024, is in the process of renewing its collection and has already installed six new computers. Through this effort, 92 new photographs of the neighborhood were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with the support of around 25 children.

With this action, in addition to expanding the neighborhood's representation on Wikimedia Commons, we were able to discuss, with the lightness of a children's perspective, the invisibility faced by the poorest sections of society, both offline and online.

See the Biblioteca Escolar Municipal do Dique' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Music for your delightment

Musica Brasilis brings to you another 377 sheet musics by 138 Brazilian composers. Among them:

Musica Brasilis is a project and a portal that makes available Brazilian music repertoires of all times and genres, but mostly metadata about Brazilian composers and scores. Rosana Lanzelotte is one of the Brazilian leading harpsichordists and the coordinator of this huge and ambitious project that aims to rescue, catalog and disseminate Brazilian compositions from neglected paper collections to open-licensed digital sheet musics.

See the Musica Brasilis' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

New batch from Midiateca Capixaba

A set of 227 media from Arquivo Público do Estado do Espírito Santo, made up of posters of cultural activities such as fairs, plays, musical performances and film shows held in cities in the state of Espírito Santo. The collection came from the State Department of Culture, which collected posters of events held by the state government, and also received donations from people who knew about the collection and wanted to contribute to the preservation of Espírito Santo's cultural memory.

See the Midiateca Capixaba' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

New batch from Museu Paulista

One of our long-term GLAM-Wiki partners is "Museu Paulista" (commonly known as Museu do Ipiranga), a main museum of the University of São Paulo. It is a Brazilian history museum located near where Emperor Pedro I proclaimed the Brazilian independence on the banks of Ipiranga brook in the Southeast region of the city of São Paulo, then the "Caminho do Mar," or road to the seashore. It contains a huge collection of furniture, documents and historically relevant artwork, especially relating to the Brazilian Empire era.

As part of our partnership, now another 84 academic articles from the museum journal Anais do Museu Paulista on History and Material Culture are available on Wikimedia Commons and on Wikidata. The articles were published in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

See the Museu Paulista's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

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