Session recording"Women Writers in Review", a case study in integrating special collections into Wikidata, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Northeastern University)
PresentationWomen Writers in Review (WWiR) "is a collection of 18th- and 19th-century reviews, publication notices, literary histories, and other texts responding to works by early women writers. WWiR is published by the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Northeastern University (NEU) and was created as part of the Cultures of Reception initiative, which fosters research into the transatlantic reception and circulation of early women's texts."(https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/review/) Since 2017, I have served as the Wiki Visiting Scholar in NEU Library's Digital Scholarship Group WWP. My involvement with WWiR focuses on Wikidata-fying (methodology development, data importation, and data integration) this special collection, an under-served area of research. Using structured data to model the collection will provide opportunities for researchers to study the reception of women's works with a new lens. For example, the Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface will eventually be integrated into the WWiR's Wikidata items with the expectation that it will serve as a research tool and pedagogical resource. The WWiR Wikidata project also hopes to serve as a case study for other institutions who wish to integrate their special collections into Wikidata. Although the WWiR Wikidata project fits within the focus of Linked Data for Production's Wikidata initiative (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Linked_Data_for_Production), it is also a collaboration with Wikisource (importation of the relevant Public Domain source documents), Wikicommons (author photos; book cover and frontispiece images), and Wikipedia (articles about the authors and works). I presented a Lightning Talk on this topic at LD4 2019, seeking feedback if it would be an area of interest to the special collections/structured data community. The positive responses led me to spend the last several months developing the project. Collaboration is warmly welcome! (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Women_Writers_in_Review) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rosiestep/WVS_Northeastern_University)
Wikidata for Archives: A Pragmatic Approach to Linked Data, Elizabeth Roke (Emory University)
At its core, archival description is about documenting the relationships between people, places, events, and records. Contextual descriptive practices used to create finding aids not only mirror the goals of linked data, but the unique people, places, and events they describe have the potential to enlarge and add new knowledge to the semantic web. While linked data methodologies seem to be a natural fit for archival description, the sophisticated infrastructure, complicated ontological structures, and expertise required to publish linked data are a heavy lift for all but the most well-resourced archival institutions. Furthermore, linked data is mostly out-of-reach for community archives, an important source of information of marginalized and underrepresented communities often left out of other descriptive sources. If linked data is to reach its full potential, there must be a low(er)-barrier way forward. This talk explores the opportunities and challenges of archival description in linked data and explores Wikidata as a pragmatic approach for publishing linked data about archival collections. It will examine existing examples of archival description in Wikidata, discuss standards-based description, and present a set of guidelines and best practices for archival description in Wikidata.
