Reinstating Female Artists to the Cultural Record via Wikidata

WikidataCon 2019, 2019-10-25

Heinz-Günter Kuper
<kuper@zib.de> <User:Hgkuper> <@hgkuper>
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0743-3346

Who dis?

digiS supports institutions in making Berlin's cultural heritage digitally available in the long-term, publicly accessible and reusable for all.

Standard Operating Procedure:
Ingest of metadata into the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library)
(and into Europeana, depending on the metadata licensing).

We are not just interested in the presentation of data on a website,…

… but also want machines to be able to process the data (esp. in terms of search).

Berliner Malweiber

"Malweiber" (painting women) was a pejorative term used to refer to women artists who were not taken seriously by the male-dominated academe at the turn of the last century. As such, they did not receive the recognition that they deserve.

Self-Portrait, Anna Bernhardi, 1891
Rightsholder: Stadtmuseum Berlin

Source: https://www.stadtmuseum.de/ausstellungen/berlin-stadt-der-frauen
See also: Berlin – City of Women (Q30156502)

Source: https://www.digis-berlin.de/projektpartner/archiv/archiv2016/

Source: https://w.wiki/ALC

Hgkuper

Please restore the following items. They are all artists with paintings in the collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin and are part of […] an import which was interrupted but hopefully can now be completed in the coming weeks.
[…]

ValterVB

No source, no sitelink, no backlink no data to understand who they are. I waited a while, then I canceled. Now if you add some reference I can restore them, but if they remain in the same state, it makes no sense to restore them.

Source: https://w.wiki/ALP

Hgkuper

[…]Wikidata at the time of writing [2018-09-22] contains 50.291.192 items. By my calculations 1.142.667 items have been deleted since the creation of Wikidata, which represents about 2% of Wikidata.[…]

Source: https://w.wiki/ALP

Suggestion:
Set up an arbitration process for those items where there is a margin of doubt (i.e. not clearly spam or vandalism).

For example: "This item has some issues."

Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Notability

(Female) Artists Without a GND ID

Source: https://w.wiki/ALi

Ida Maurer-Hahn

Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q44915133

Ida Maurer-Hahn

Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57081659

But there's hope…

Source: https://www.dnb.de/DE/Professionell/ProjekteKooperationen/Projekte/GND4C/gnd4c.html

What lessons can be learnt from all this?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_data_officer

Lucy Roberts from Bartlesville, OK
via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0]

Tasks

Data Governance: Strategic decisions regarding data usage
Data Architecture: Conception and planning of data sources and data consumers
Data Quality: Ensuring high quality data

Data Quality

Ensure that, for example,

uniform measurments and
controlled vocabularies (esp. for materials and techniques)

are used by various editors in compliance with the relevant metadata standards.

Wikibase

DIY Authority Control
(or controlled vocabulary…)

Source: https://blog.wikimedia.de/2019/05/09/new-testing-ground-for-wikibase-a-federal-agency-goes-on-an-expedition-in-the-wiki-universe/

digiS Annual Conference 2019
"WerteDaten – DatenWerte"

2019-12-05, Zuse Institute Berlin

Details (in German):
https://tinyurl.com/digiS-JK2019

Thank You
for Your Attention!

The slides are online:

https://git.io/Je0oo

https://hgkuper.github.io/presentations/wdcon2019

CC BY 4.0

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Further Reading

CC BY 4.0