2019:GLAM/The Met Museum and New Frontiers in Wikidata engagement

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GLAM/The Met Museum and New Frontiers in Wikidata engagement

Alexievich · Saturday 16:00 - 16:30

Title

The Met Museum and New Frontiers in Wikidata engagement

Description

This past year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York embarked on an ambitious plan to work with Wikimedia content, becoming one of the few GLAM institutions employing two Wikimedians within the institution to work on its open access initiatives.

Richard Knipel, Wikimedian in residence and Andrew Lih, Wikimedia strategist, explain how The Met is leading the way in comprehensive linked open data contributions (and continuing synchronization) of The Met's diverse collections with Wikidata and how this is spurring new experiments such as using artificial intelligence techniques in computer vision and machine learning to help generate depiction metadata. This is the first known use of machine learning on a large scale to contribute content to Wikidata. They will explain the history of The Met Museum collaboration with the Wikimedia community and the ongoing strategy for working with updating Wikidata and Structured Data on Commons. They will also describe the design and implementation of a new Wikidata Distributed Game that led to more than 3,000 decisions about artwork depiction statements.

Among the topics discussed include:

• In 2018-2019, the Metropolitan Museum of Art entered the third year of its open access initiatives.
• A quick history of The Met Museum's contributions and activities with the Wikimedia community (See: en:User:Pharos/Wikimania)
• A number of challenges in the course of the project that would be instructive for other GLAM entities:
  • Defining a scope of work around two collections - The Met highlights (~2,000 items) and the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (~8,000 items).
  • Crafting tools and scripts to perform detailed analysis and synchronization of Wikidata's partial collections information against an institution's database or API
  • Addressing inadequacies in Wikidata modeling of materials, genres of artwork, dates, and other categories
  • Determining best practices with mapping controlled vocabularies from an institution to Wikidata taxonomies, such as using custom terms versus well-accepted but unwieldy standards like Getty AAT.
  • Formulating best collaborative practices around Wikidata tools, such as Distributed Game, Mix-n-match and other interactive tools
  • Generating new co-creative demonstrations to showcase the benefits of open access collaboration, such as using Wikidata Query and multimedia tools

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

• Goal 4: Quality education - "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all"
• Goal 5: Gender equality - "Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls."
• Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure - "Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation"
• Goal 10: Reducing inequalities - "Reduce income inequality within and among countries."
• Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities - "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable."
• Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals - "Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development."

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved: TBD

Session leader(s)

• Richard Knipel, Wikimedian in Residence, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Andrew Lih, Wikimedia Strategist, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Usernames

• User:Pharos
• User:Fuzheado

Affiliation/country

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA

E-mail contact

• pharosofalexandria@gmail.com
• andrew.lih@gmail.com

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Computer-based training
• Discussion-based training
• Workshop to identify and try to solve problem
• Roundtable discussion forum
• Panel with audience Question & Answer session
• Other

Length of session

20 minutes minimum, 45 minutes maximum

Supporting work

Optional: See above links

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room: Projection and seating for 40 or so participants

• Audience: People interested in workflows with metadata with cultural institutions

• Recording: Recording allowed