Dictionary of Sydney

Posted on December 17, 2009 by wittylama

As many of you know, until recently I was employed at the Dictionary of Sydney as the Multimedia Coordinator. I left a couple of months ago and took up a short-term contract at AustLII running the Australasian Legal Scholarship Library. However it was at the Dictionary of Sydney that I ‘cut my teeth’ in copyright and also in GLAM relation so it’s fair to say that I still have a strong connection with the project.

Simply put, the Dictionary of Sydney (DoS) is a free-access, digital history of the city – its people, stories, places, events – managed by the DoS Trust funded by the Australian Research Council. And it is a professional history project, not the Yellow Pages…

…and it just recently launched!

All DoS texts are original research by known scholars of the topic and most – and this is the bit that I’m most proud of – are licensed under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (cc-by-sa) and are therefore Wikipedia-compatible Free Cultural Works. All of the contributing authors were given the option of allowing their work to be re-usable and most chose to do so. This kind of optional CC licensing is AFAIK up-there as CC best practice and it was discussed in the CC-Australia blog and also in their Australasian case-studies book. You can see all of these articles by clicking “sort by license” here – hundreds of them!

Differences from, and relationship with, Wikipedia

Of course, one of the most frequently asked questions is why do we need a new encyclopedia in this era of Wikipedia. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I was brought onboard the project – to make sure that the two projects were complementary and not competing.

1) anti-NOR
One thing that needs noting is that DoS is all Original Research: the scholarship is new; it has named authors; it has an authorial point of view. Also, unlike most professional encyclopedia, it cites its references. Because of all this DoS is a fantastic source of references for Wikipedia. DoS already links to Wikipedia in the “external links” section of some of its records about people, for example the famous photographer Harold Cazneaux or the convict Esther Abrahams.

2) Records
If you go the Wikipedia page about the Sydney Opera House you are taken straight to the article. In DoS, you are taken first to the record view which concatenates all information about the subject including a link to the article itself. In Wikipedia parlance this is somewhere between a stub, disambiguation page and an infobox and means that DoS can have records for subjects that it knows exist, but no one has yet written an article about it.

soh

I like to think of the record view as akin to a 21st Century library card catalogue. The article contains a full text (sometimes with curated pictures alongside) but the record view contains information such as mapping, demographics, timelines, multimedia galleries and semantic relationship statuses.

3) Semantic relationship statuses
Say what? [warning! somewhat technical]
What this means is that all records are linked to each other through a series of structured relationships. In Wikipedia we have a folksonomy of categories – whatever seems to work best, that’s what Wikipedia creates. By contrast, in DoS there is a structured ontology (with relatively shallow nested depth) of types of things that any subject can “be”. If it is “sub-type: animal” then it must also be “type: natural” – see for yourself by sorting by type in any of the browse buttons on the right hand column’s toolbar.

Furthermore, all relationships between subjects are also chosen from an equally highly structured ontology. For example, the famous colonial Sydney architect Francis Greenway designed the equally famous Sydney building the Hyde Park Barracks. The relationship of Greenway’s article to the Barracks’ article is “relationship type: architect of”. This also means there is an automatic inverse relationship from the Barracks back to Greenway. There are a limited number of relationship possibilities and include things like “friend of” and “married to” and these allow you to plot the shortest distance between different subjects – a semantic Sydney-bacon number if you will. This enables the possibility for the first time to find connections between disparate aspects of the city’s history that were not previously known.

The relationships can also be given a location in time and/or place. For example, Greenway’s professional patron was the Governor of the day – Lachlan Macquarie. They have the relationship of “patron/patronised”. However, at some point the two had a big falling out and this is where the time aspect is important. This relationship was not everlasting but had specific start and end dates that can be automatically mapped on a timeline.

macquarie

The relationships, and automatically generated interactive timeline of Lachlan Macquarie (whose DoS article is also cc-by-sa, by the way).

In Wikipedia there are no formal relationship statuses and therefore all links are “dumb links”. That is, the website does not know why the two articles are linked together and you have to work it out from reading the context of the linked words. Pieces of information that know their place in the database constitute the core of the “semantic web“. For the technically inclined, DoS uses “RDF triples” which is what Semantic MediaWiki and DBpedia are also working on.

[I must admit, we had good fun in the office working out what the relationship statuses would be, and especially the reverse statuses. For example, if you’re allowed “friend of” can you also have “nemesis of”? And, what if the relationship isn’t mutual – can you be “friended by” or “nemesis-ed of”?]

4) Essays
Most of the articles in DoS are about specific “things” – buildings, people, events, places. However, many articles are also about “subjects” such as transport, health, politics… These essays have no “record view” (described above) because they cannot be given a time, place or formal relationship status. They just are. Some are comparable to Wikipedia articles whilst others simply don’t match the manual of style for what constitutes a Wikipedia article. The list of all these essays can be found under the heading “sort by type > Thematic entries“. Some of the more esoteric essays are:
– Reading the Roads a history of road markings in Sydney, official and user-generated (cc-by-sa)
– Aboriginal Migration to Sydney since WWII which is pretty self explanatory, if complex.
– Coal Lumpers the wonderful profession of hauling coal on and off ships (cc-by-sa)

Looking over Miller’s Point, c1875-85, where Coal Lumpers would live during the week near the shipyards [used to illustrate the Coal lumpers article]

5) Anti-NPOV
The structure of the website allows for multiple, potentially conflicting, stories to be written about the same topic whereas in Wikipedia these stories must be merged into one neutral narrative. The articles do not attempt to have a Neutral Point of View. Currently there are no “double articles” of this type, but they will come in the future.

6) Scope
Obviously, being the Dictionary of Sydney (albeit the greater Sydney region) there is a geographical constraint of scope that Wikipedia does not have. This means, for example, that the article on the Chinese is only about their experience and impact on Sydney – not worldwide. Perhaps in the future Wikipedia might also include ethnographic histories at this level of granularity but currently it does not.

mmmm…. Sheep’s tongue for eight penny ha’penny and good sperm candles a bargain at five penny ha’penny per pound! [used to illustrate the Chinese in Sydney article]

Future releases of the website will be including things like:
– Mobile version, integrated with QR codes (or similar) on the official information panels around the city.
– More articles (obviously), but more importantly, contesting articles about the same subject.
– More external links from DoS out to Wikipedia articles, including links to articles in non-English editions (when applicable).

I have listed a couple of DoS’s cc-by-sa articles in the external links of some of Wikipedia’s articles: The suburb Surry Hills (WP, DoS); The Archibald Fountain (WP, DoS) and Sydney’s Trams (WP, DoS). I’ve also notified Wikiproject:Sydney and indicated my clear CoI. If these links are positively received I will progressively add some more and hopefully people will start to incorporate some of the Dictionary of Sydney’s research into Wikipedia too!

Posted in History | 5 Comments

Culture24 links

Posted on December 7, 2009 by wittylama

Recently, I have become aware of an organisation called “Culture24“. This is a British crew who are publicly funded to provide a service – promote and support the UK cultural sector online (and, hopefully, go and visit them in real life too).

They provide teachers’ educational resources, GLAM information listings (especially useful for the smaller museums that don’t have their own web-presence), event and activity listings by time and location as well as news/reviews and culture-sector updates. Their director was one of the keynote speakers at the NDF conference I blogged about last week.

All in all their service is publicly funded, wide-ranging, interesting and  a really useful source for Wikipedia references.

– Change –

It was, until relatively recently, known by a different name – “The 24 hour museum”. They changed their name to “Culture24” for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the fact that it’s about more than just museums and also because no one could tell what on earth “24 hour museum” actually meant. A horological museum perhaps? A museum that stays open overnight? The intended implication was that was was that it is a place to get your cultural-fix at any time and this purpose is served much better under the new name.

They are shutting the old website and redirecting everything to the new website homepage. However, given the depth of the site, most inbound links to the old website will not resolve to the new one neatly (and, perversely, redirecting articles actually decreases their google rank). People are being asked to change their inbound links.

– Problem –

According to the link tracker, at the time of publishing the English edition of Wikipedia has 217 external links to http://*.24hourmuseum.org.uk (and derivatives) and many of these are both important and will break when the old website is switched off.

Links from their specific museum listings redirect neatly (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/museum_gfx_en/SC000290.html ) but news items do not (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART41764.html )

The staff at Culture24 see Wikipedia’s external links to their website as very important and want to make sure they work with us. As a result they came to the discussion page for “Wikipedia: Advice for the cultural sector” to ask how to make sure that Wikipedia was linking correctly. This is, as far as I’ve seen, the absolute best-practice example of GLAM-WIKI interaction “in the field”. Read it for yourself here.

Because of the obvious care that Culture24 staff have in working with Wikipedians I think it of the utmost importance that we try to show the same respect back and help them with their problem.

– Challenge –

Can we go through this list of external links and clean them all up in time?

Could you take the time to choose a section of the list, check the reference, and change it to the equivalent page on the new website. I bet we can have it done in a week if a few people help me out. Some of the links are to the “user” or “talk” namespaces and I think these can be discounted.

I think several can probably be deleted but I think many more can be added in. Given Culture24 is the official and publicly-funded register of museums in Britain, I would argue that we should link out to their record in the external links section of every Wikipedia article in the Category:museums in England and other related categories. What do you think?

– Summary –

Help transfer as many of  the links as possible from 24hourmuseum.co.uk to the equivalent page on Culture24.co.uk using this list as your guide.

Thank you!

Posted in museums | 2 Comments

NZ National Digital Forum

Posted on December 1, 2009 by wittylama

Being online now: culture, creativity and community

Last week I had the honour of being invited to attend the 8th annual National Digital Forum conference, held at the national museum Te Papa in Wellington, New Zealand.  The NDF is truly a “GLAM sector” body and its continued growth is testament to the importance that the digital world has across the whole cultural sector – not just in museums or libraries etc. It was a fantastically professional conference – buzzing with potential and people huddled in corners talking about how they could get their institution to be more digitally accessible. Awesome.
I was invited to give a short presentation as part of an opening day plenary session panel that was all about setting the scene with some diverse examples that fit the theme of the conference. This was my presentation:
View more documents from wittylama.
Recalling that the audience was a GLAM audience – I made sure to make the point that Wikimedians are just beginning to “learn how to play well with others” and that we’re not pretending that we have all the answers. I find that the GLAM sector is (by and large) vaguely uneasy about the whole “Wikipedia thing” and that a recognition of fallibility on our behalf goes some way to making us look less scary (see also my previous posts “content liberation” and “making Wikipedia GLAM-friendly“).
The first Keynote presentation was from the savvy Daniel Incandela (@danielincandela) the Director of New Media, Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). By complete chance I happened to be sitting next to Daniel on the flight over from Sydney and I recognised him by his tweet that I had seen just before I turned off my phone:
tweet
I read that and realised that I too was in a Qantas exit row – next to a guy with an American accent and a laptop that had a document with keywords like “digital” highlighted on it. Spooky eh?
Daniel’s beautifully laid-back presentation was an exploration of some of the myriad projects that the IMA has been undertaking to bridge the gap between digital culture and “real world” cultural interaction. Also, it emphasised the need for technology to be used to build connections and express a personality rather than being and end in itself.
One of the things I personally took away from this speech was the IMA’s “Dashboard“. This is a project of the IMA that enforces Organisational Transparency and is something that I challenge the Wikimedia Foundation to look at instituting itself. To quote their own website, the Dashboard is a visualisation project in “…an ongoing effort to measure various aspects of the Museum’s performance.”
IMA Dashboard
The second Keynote was by the gregarious Jane Finnins (@Janefinnis, blog) from Culture24 in Britain – whom I had the pleasure of meeting not two weeks before when in London. Culture24 is a cultural heritage online service that provides, among other things, listings of cultural events geographically/thematically and also teachers’ resources. Her presentation discussed the way that the organisation has changed over the years to try to reach the rapidly changing needs of the digital society looking for a cultural fix! Unfortunately I can’t find the slides online (although, apparently the sessions were filmed) but it was very interesting to see the iterative process that Culture24 went through to design their website to be useful to their *actual* visitors rather than producing a one sized-fits-all template. Their ability to do all the re-design work and then realise that the internet had moved on in the meantime is something that the Wikimedia world is still grappling with – Wikimedia’s usability projects are just starting to take stock of where we have to go in order to catch up with the usability expectations of the non-tech savvy (but still internet enabled) public.
The final Keynote was delivered by the indefatigable Nina Simon (@ninaksimon) – she of the *can’t recommend it too highly* Museum 2.0 blog. The presentation itself was a list of home-truths about making projects work (like “align the project with the mission statement” and “chose the right tools for the job”) but she brought these messages home with such fantastic examples that really made them resonate.
Oh – and she ended her presentation with A.Giant.Gong.
Seriously, every conference should end like this. With a big Indonesian gong, suspended from the ceiling on stage. Nina asked everyone to get out two business cards of their own and write on no.1 something they need professionally. On card no.2 they would write something that they can offer professionally. People were then asked to circulate around the room and try to make a pair of cards match. If they did, come up on stage, and….
GOOOOOONNNNNGGGG!
Thanks go especially to Courtney Johnston (@auchmill) for organising the show, Paul Reynolds (@littlehigh) for helping me get there, and of course Philipa Tocker from Museums Aotearoa for letting me stay.
The specific outcome of this conference is the creation of this Ning space to host conversations specific to the New Zealand digital culture sector:
I must admit, I’m no fan of Nings in general – they’re an unwieldy beast and symptomatic of a perceived need to “own the conversation” – but this one appears to have been taken up with surprising speed. Good luck to it and good luck to the NDF!
Posted in museums | 6 Comments

Low-Hanging GLAM fruit

Posted on November 19, 2009 by wittylama

I’ve been meeting with a lot of GLAM institutions recently who are keen to collaborate with Wikimedia projects but, unsurprisingly, wanted to “go on a few dates before getting married”. So, this post is directed to those institutions who are looking at finding a small, manageable project that they can undertake with the Wikimedia community – a project that has a low level of risk and difficulty but with a relatively high level of measurable impact. A good ROI for some low-hanging fruit, if you will. This is by no means the only thing a GLAM could collaborate on with the Wikimedia community, so don’t be limited by it, but it is nevertheless a viable option.

Dearest GLAM,
What I suggest is that you upload one image, of one object, to Wikimedia Commons.
Just the one.
But, a quite specific one.

1) Selection
I suggest that you find within your collection an item that is notable in and of itself. Ideally this object already has a Wikipedia article written about it already or it should be an object of individual significance enough to warrant such an article (see our policy on Notability). If you don’t have any such items in your collection perhaps there is something, though not uniquely notable, that is a perfect example of its type and warrants being the headline image for the article about genre/style/craft.

To avoid conflicts between the Wikimedia community and the institution about whether the faithful reproduction of a 2D object creates new copyright in favour of the organisation making the reproduction (see the backgrount to the NPG controversy for more information about this subject), I recommend specifically choosing a 3D item – an ancient sculpture or archeological artifact for example – that is in itself definitively out of copyright. Thereby, your photograph of this object is incontrovertibly the institution’s own copyright and no other copyright claims exist.

2) Username
Go to Wikimedia Commons (the multimedia repository associated with Wikipedia) and create a user account. Technically, Wikimedia policy says you’re not supposed to have “role accounts” (usernames associated with an organisation rather than an individual). Speaking for myself, I can understand this on Wikipedia (where a role-account may be promotional and unaccountable) but on Commons having a role account seems to me to be a good thing as it provides good attribution to the institution. So, whilst the anti-role-account rule is in place I suggest the institution create a username something like “user:JohnCitizen_NationalMuseumofAtlantis” (this gives both attribution and personalisation).

3) Tech specs
Take your “canonical photograph” of this item and compare it to the existing free-use images available of it online (e.g. in the Wikipedia article, on Flickr, Google Image search etc.) and also compare it to Wikipedia’s “Featured Picture Criteria“. Ideally the image being donated to Wikimedia Commons should be of higher quality than any other freely-available image of the object and the image should be clearly above the minimum standards for being listed as a Featured Picture. Among other things, this means that it should be at least 1000pixels along the longest side. But, as with all of Wikipedia’s quality standards, this tends to increase over time so it is good to go significantly above these criteria if possible (especially if the subject of the photograph has fine/intricate details). Also the level of “wow factor” to the Wikimedia community is almost directly proportional to the resolution of the image. For example, some of our most highly prized images are simply huge. (Also, please don’t upload images with watermarks or equivalent).

4) Upload and notify
Although it’s a bit unwieldy (and we’re working on improving it), use the “upload file” form and upload the image putting in as much attribution, metadata, captioning as you want. Many of the specific elements of uploading are a bit tricky to work out (e.g. placing it in categories or giving it a geo-code) but the essential should be straightforward. The most important bit is that the image is “your own work” (i.e. it’s copyright to the institution) and that you agree to release this copyright under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. (Other acceptable copyright licenses are available but this is the Wikimedia community’s preference.) Yes, this license does mean that third-parties can make commercial use of your image without asking your specific permission. But! If they make a derivative work (such as incorporating the image into a montage for a documentary film) then that derivative work has to be “shared alike” and made equally freely-available. This, not surprisingly, is something that commercial re-users rarely want to do and therefore they would need to get your specific permission for their usage requirements. Feel free to charge them $$$$$ if they are unwilling to release their work into the commons like you have. 🙂

Because your image has never been made available before under a free-license, it is probable that Wikimedians checking the copyright status of new uploads might be suspicious that the image has been uploaded without the copyright holder’s consent. Write an email, from your work email address (for verification purposes), to the “permissions system” attesting to the fact that the upload is legitimate and that you really did intend to release it under that license. If you don’t do this, someone might list the image for deletion from Wikimedia Commons in an attempt to make sure that the copyright of your institution isn’t being infringed. The burden of proof on copyright checking lies with the uploader, not the deleter.

5) Tell a Wikimedian
Tell several. Tweet it. Dent it. Blog it. Notify someone on the discussion page associated with the Wikipedia article about the item itself. Leave a message with your local Wikimedia Chapter or the relevant WikiProject. These people will then rally around the image and make sure that it is appropriately categorised, and that it is used in relevant Wikipedia articles, probably in several languages. For example, the Deutsches Bundesarchiv ‘s image of Konrad Adenauer is now used as the headline image in upwards of 15 language editions of Wikipedia. It is now THE image of Adenaur across the internet (see the “global file usage“).

6) Go for Gold
Leave it a week and then check to see how many times the image is being used in Wikipedia, especially the Wikipedia edition in your institution’s “home” language. Assuming you’ve uploaded an image of high enough quality then the image may very well qualify as a Featured Picture. Nudge a Wikimedian or two to ask them to nominate it as a Featured Picture Candidate for you. What will follow will be about a week’s worth of public critiquing of the image’s technical quality, encyclopedic value, replicability… The image may get worked on a bit in Photoshop by a Wikimedian or someone might come along and crop it more tightly. But, if all goes well, then the image will be given the gold star that is Featured Image status. Congratulations.

The image is now worthy to be displayed on Wikipedia’s main page for a day. There is a queue for this and every FP is eligible for this honour once. Generally FPs go on the mainpage on a first-in first-out basis, but hopefully given that you’re a special guest on Wikipedia, someone will bump-up your image to appear on the mainpage sooner rather than later – but there’s no promises 🙂 Unfortunately, we don’t currently clicktrack people going to the GLAM’s website from the image’s attribution statement (for privacy reasons) but if you are aware of the image’s imminent appearance on the mainpage then perhaps you could get your own tech department to monitor inbound traffic to your website over that 24 period to see if there is any difference. You can also check how often the article appears is viewed by clicking on the “history” tab at the top of the article, then click “page view statistics”. You should see a noticeable spike once the stats are compiled a day or two later.

7) Repeat!

Best of luck.

Posted in copyright, museums | 5 Comments

Part 2: Making Wikipedia "GLAM-friendly"

Posted on November 1, 2009 by wittylama

Coming after part 1 this post is about what’s been happening in the Wikimedia world that will make us more “GLAM friendly”.

We already know that newbie editors have difficulty in the first place due to being bitten by older editors – as has been described and demonstrated. But, at least as far as editors to Wikipedia coming from the gallery, library, archive and museum sector (GLAM) goes, things are getting a little bit friendlier.

1. Advice for the Cultural Sector a.k.a. [[WP:GLAM]]

With the help of some dedicated editors (special thanks to johnbod, johnuniq and uncledougie) I’ve put together a “one stop shop” advice page for professionals from the GLAM sector coming to Wikipedia wanting to edit.

wpglam

I do not consider it to be complete or finished but I do think it is now ready enough for a more prime-time audience. Not really an essay, wikiproject, or policy page, it’s more of a place for people to seek advice written in terms that they can (hopefully) relate to.  So, whilst the advice written there isn’t unique or qualitatively different from the advice on other pages across Wikipedia, it brings together all of the information relevant to people from the GLAM sector, gives relevant examples, and provides a forum for asking questions to people who are interested in improving GLAM-WIKI relations.

In the future this page may grow. It might gain a “GLAM noticeboard” for actions needing attention or perhaps it might become a place where GLAM representatives can meet Wikimedians who are wiling to be wiki-mentors. We’ll see where it takes us. One good suggestion (by Pharos) was the creation of a GLAM userbox that could be used by professionals as a shorthand to indicate that they understand the rules about declaring a CoI.

Something quite interesting happened when I tweeted that this page was now published with the words:

“Gallery, Library, Archive & Museum folks, please check out http://bit.ly/3k2KoY My attempt to make #Wikipedia a #GLAM-friendly place.”

This was re-tweeted by a series of museum sector people (which is awesome) but the phrasing was changed to this:

museums-tweet

“Wikipedia now encouraging…” implies that we weren’t before, which gives me some insight into how unwelcome GLAM professionals felt. I never wrote the words “now encouraging” but I’m pleased that that is how the GLAM sector sees it. On the other hand it worries me that they felt discouraged or not allowed to participate before.

2. Conflict of Interest guidelines update

Similarly, the Conflict of Interest guideline has been updated to include a new section that specifically states:

“Museum curators, librarians, archivists, art historians, heritage interpreters, conservators, documentation managers, subject specialists, and managers of an academic special collection (or similar profession) are encouraged to use their knowledge to help improve Wikipedia.” [This is repeated in the aforementioned advice page]

For the last few weeks there has been a section in the “non controversial edits” heading that referred to “archives, special collections or libraries” being allowed to add links back to their collection in certain circumstance. This has now been removed and replaced with the broader statement that people in aforementioned kinds of professions are specifically encouraged to edit Wikipedia. I had received feedback from the first wording that because the word “museum” was not included that museum professionals thought they had been intentionally excluded. This was not the case and the new wording makes this clear – professionals across the cultural/collections sector are encouraged to edit.

There remains significant concern that this policy will bring forth a flood of linkspam from cultural institutions linking out to everything in their collection. So PLEASE, GLAM-folks, focus on writing content in the articles themselves rather than “go crazy” by merely placing lots of links to your institution’s website. Of course, you can reference your website’s collection as part of your work but if someone looking up your edit history (yes, everyone’s edit history is available for view e.g. Jimmy Wales’) and finds that the only thing a GLAM professional’s account has ever done is link back to the same organisation’s website, that might result in a push for more restrictive wording on the CoI guidelines.

Worse still, there is a worry that pseudo-museums will point to this policy and use wikilawyering to add external links to items of dubious notability:

3. Multimedia usability meeting

Later this week there will be a three-day meeting in Paris to hothouse the issues surrounding the use of multimedia in Wikimedia projects. The specific context is the grant given by the Ford Foundation regarding multimedia usability. The team for this grant is now coming into shape and this meeting will kickstart their efforts. First and foremost the multimedia usability team will be working out better and more efficient ways to upload (and mass-upload) images to Wikimedia commons. But, beyond that there are many other things that they might be able to tackle which are of specific relevance to GLAM organisations. If Flickr Commons has major cultural institutions queuing up to upload their own photographs under a free license then surely Wikimedia can get some of that love too. Unlike Flickr (owned by Yahoo! inc.) Wikimedia has the huge advantages, from the GLAMs point of view, that we have no advertising, are non-profit and can provide excellent contextualisation of their cultural works within Wikipedia.

Posted in museums | 5 Comments