GLAM/Newsletter/March 2017/Contents/Sweden report
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Art+Feminism 2017; Connected Open Heritage; Digikult; Art on Wikipedia; Writing about Gothenburg's history; Updating image description with new research results
Art+Feminism 2017
The edit-a-thon Art+Feminism was held at the Royal Armoury in Stockholm, on the 8th of March. About 80 participants showed up and contributed to Wikipedia.
Two appreciated events took place during the day – apart from the editing. Between editing articles visitors could join a guided tour of the museum. And at the end of the evening the journalists and film makers Wanda Bendjelloul and Katarina Hellberg presented their work to make visible women photographers who played a big part in the Swedish history of photography, in their movie "Upphovsmannen var en kvinna".
The result of the edit-a-thon was around 50 new articles and a lot more edits. The day was a great success and several media – newspapers and local television – reported from the edit-a-thon. The participants were very diligent and the atmosphere was great and everybody helped each other to make great contributions.
Connected Open Heritage
In March, only a few days were spent on the preparations for the batchupload of images from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition due to vacation.
On the Wikidata front, we have been working on uploading some datasets of Swedish cultural heritage. We started off with about 1,400 working life museums – a special type of museum commemorating our industrial heritage, such as the Shoe Industry Museum in Kumla. Since they all have coordinates, you can get an overview of their distribution on a map. We have also added over a hundred listed historical ships.
We've just started uploading the by far largest dataset in the Wiki Loves Monuments database, that of Swedish ancient monuments. It contains over 145 thousands items: runestones, cairns, petroglyphs and many other types of archaeological objects. Each of them an invaluable source of knowledge about our past, soon possible to be queried through Wikidata.
Digikult
Digikult celebrated its 5th anniversary this year as a conference with focus on digital heritage. During the two days a variety of topics were covered in both inspirational and informational form. Among the inspirational takeaways were Wolfgang Wild, founder of the history brand Retronaut, talking about the SPEED (Seen, Positive, Easy, Emotive, Disruptive) model in creating viral success and Viktor Lindbäck, founder of Platsminnen (i.e. Place Memories), a tool using old images from cultural institutions to help elderly people with reminiscence training by showing them environments and content from their younger years. Among the informational presentations were the talk by Frida Starck Lindfors about Stockholmskällan and how the project Välkommen till min plats (i.e. Welcome to my neighborhood) helped in gathering new material to the historical digital portal as the project worked with students from parts of the city that previously were not that well covered and Alexy Karenowska from The Institute for Digital Archaeology who talked about the Million Image Database and the reconstruction of a scale model of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra using 3D techniques and putting it in places like Trafalgar Square, London, and at the Venice Biennale to raise awareness of both the situation and the current state of antiquities in Palmyra.
Art on Wikipedia
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1 March 2017 a new regular edit-a-thon started in my hometown of Gothenburg, this time centered around art. Every Wednesday afternoon we gather around a table in the reading room at Göteborgs Konsthall, at the centre of town. This regular event, simply called Konst på Wikipedia ('Art on Wikipedia'), is a collaboration between Göteborgs Konsthall (the town gallery, founded in 1923) and Wikimedia Sverige. A couple of regular local editors create the backbone, with visitors and other editors joining in at irregular intervals. So far the attendance levels have been just as irregular, but slowly we gather more attention, from spreading news through various channels. At the edit-a-thon we welcome both newcomers and veterans, to learn from each other and make the concept of Wikipedia as a useful information tool around art more known.
This event is open the last three hours every Wednesday when the gallery is open – i.e. most of the weeks. As an event it is a spin-off from the related Kvinnliga huvudpersoner på Wikipedia, where local wikipedians have been gathering nearly every Tuesday since March 2014. That regular edit-a-thon, also a WMSE-sponsored event, regularly sees at least half a dozen editors from 13:00 to (at least) 17:00 hours. It takes place in Litteraturhuset, a cultural centre with a lot of related events and activities ("Hi! Your article on Wikipedia doesn't have a photo. Do you mind if I take a photo of you?"). And we hope that Wednesdays at the gallery also slowly could gain momentum. Examples of the articles edited or created so far are listed here. And a related wish list is slowly getting bigger here.
Writing about Gothenburg's history
22 March 2017 wikipedians in Gothenburg started a new edith-a-thon together with the local history association in Gothenburg. The purpose is to write new, and enhance existing, articles about Gothenburg, Sweden's second largest city, on Swedish Wikipedia. We get access to their archive with a lot of books, old newspapers, folders, photos and other sources, which can be used for Wikipedia articles. Hopefully we can get members of the local history association interested in Wikipedia and engage them as new editors. The chairman of the association hopes that they, by the collaboration with Wikipedia, can reach a new group of people interested in local history, and to get the information in the archive used.
The edit-a-thons will be held biweekly during the spring, on Wednesday from 18.00 to 20.00. At the first meeting we got information about what we can find in the archive, and wrote a short article about Göteborgs Mössfabriks AB, a company manufacturing caps and hats from 1892. Two weeks later, we improved the article about the local School of Design and Crafts with information about its history.
Since 2011 we have a project concerning Gothenburg on Swedish Wikipedia. The collaboration with the local history association can also give us contacts with the local museum and other organizations in Gothenburg. The new edit-a-thon was recognized by the local newspaper Göteborgs-Posten which had a short news item about it and gave a link to our wiki meetup page.
Updating image description with new research results
Together with the Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum (LSH) Wikimedia Sverige has during several years worked to upload almost 47,000 high resolution images from the museum collections. These collections are still evolving though as research is continuously being done on the objects included in them. Descriptions, dates and other facts may change after we have uploaded the image of the item to Wikimedia Commons and we are faced with the challenge of updating the information there. At the same time Wikimedia Commons is also very much alive and the image pages undergo multiple edits by the time we discover that some of the information might be outdated.
As a pilot project we looked at a collection of 737 images of Chinese porcelain where substantial research had been done since we uploaded the images in 2014. We developed a script which managed to update 711 of these images with new and richer information without a single user edit getting overwritten. We chose not to update the remaining 26 images automatically but the script would also allow for easy inspection of the remaining images so that user changes can be identified and re-added after an upload.
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