Wikidata in the Classroom at the University of Edinburgh

Summary:

The University of Edinburgh are looking to support the development of a data-literate workforce over the next ten years to support Scotland's growing digital economy. This therefore represents a huge opportunity for educators, researchers and data scientists to support students in this aim. The first Wikidata in the Classroom assignment at the university is taking place this semester on the Data Science for Design MSc course and two groups of students are working on a project to import the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database into Wikidata to see what possibilities surfacing this data as structured linked open data can achieve.

Wikidata in the Classroom

The New York Times described this current era as an ‘era of data but no facts’. Data is increasingly valuable as a key driver of the 21st century economy and is certainly abundant with 90% of the world’s data reportedly created in the last two years. Yet, it has never been more difficult to find ‘truth in the numbers’ with over 60 trillion pages to navigate and terabytes of unstructured data to (mis)interpret.

The way forward: developing information & data literacy in our students and developing Wikidata as a linked hub of verifiable data where digital provenance can be checked

“We need to increase the reputational consequences and change the incentives for making false statements… right now, it pays to be outrageous, but not to be truthful.”(Nyhan in the Economist, 2016)
”This challenge is not just for school librarians to prepare the next generation to be informed but for all librarians to assist the whole population.”(Abram, 2016)

Issues at the heart of the information age have been exposed: there exists a glut of information & a sea of data to navigate with little formalised guidance as to how to find our way through it. For the beleaguered student, this glut makes it near impossible to find ‘truth in the numbers’.

Meeting the information & data literacy needs of our students

The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region has recently secured a £1.1bn City Region deal from the UK and Scottish Governments. Out of this amount, the University of Edinburgh will receive in the region of £300 million towards making Edinburgh the ‘data capital of Europe’ through developing data-driven innovation. Data "has the potential to transform public and private organisations and drive developments that improve lives.” More specifically, the university is being trusted with the responsibility of delivering a data-literate workforce of 100,000 young people over the next ten years; a workforce equipped with the data skills necessary to meet the needs of Scotland’s growing digital economy.

The implementation of Wikidata in the curriculum therefore presents a massive opportunity for educators, researchers and data scientists alike; not least in honouring the university’s commitment to the creating, curating & dissemination of open knowledge. A Wikidata assignment allows students to develop their understanding of, and engagement with, issues such as: data completeness; data ethics; digital provenance; data analysis; data processing; as well as making practical use of a raft of tools and data visualisations. The fact that Wikidata is also linked open data means that students can help connect to & leverage from a variety of other datasets; helping to fuel discovery through exploring the direct and indirect relationships at play in this semantic web of knowledge. This real-world application of teaching and learning enables insights in a variety of disciplines; be it in open science, digital humanities, cultural heritage, open government and much more besides. Wikidata is also a community-driven project so this allows students to work collaboratively and develop the online citizenship skills necessary in today’s digital economy.

Data Science for Design MSc – Importing the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database into Wikidata

At the University of Edinburgh, we have begun our first Wikidata in the Classroom assignment this semester on the Data Science for Design MSc course. At the course’s Data Fair on 26th October 2017, researchers from across the university presented the 45 masters students in Design Informatics with approximately 13 datasets to choose from to work on in groups of three. Happily, two groups were enthused to import the university’s Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database into Wikidata (the choice of database to propose was suggested by a colleague). This fabulous resource began life in the 1990s before being realised in 2001-2003. It had as its aim to collect, collate and record all known information about accused witches and witchcraft belief in early modern Scotland (from 1563 to 1736) in a Microsoft Access database and to create a web-based user interface for the database. Since 2003, the data has remained static in the Access database and so students at the 2018 Data Fair were invited to consider what could be done if the data were exported into Wikidata and linked to other datasets. Beyond this, what new insights & visualisations of the data could be achieved?

The methodology

A similar methodology to managing Wikipedia assignments was employed; making the transition from managing a Wikipedia assignment to managing a Wikidata assignment an easy one. The two groups of students underwent a 1.5 hour practical induction on working with Wikidata and third party applications such as Histropedia, the timeline of everything, before being introduced to the Access database. They then discussed collaboratively how best to divide the task of analysing and exporting the data before deciding one group would work on (1) importing records for the 3,212 accused witches while the other group would work on (2) the import of the witch trial records and (3) the people associated with these trials (lairds, judges, ministers, prosecutors, witnesses etc).

At this current juncture, the groups have researched and now submitted their data models for review. Now the proposed data model has been checked and agreed upon, the students are ready to process the data from the Access database into a format Wikidata can import (making use of the Wikidata plug-in on Google Spreadsheets). Once this stage is complete, the students can then choose how to visualise the linked data in a number of ways; such as maps, timelines, graphs, bubble charts and more. The students are to complete their project by presenting their insights and data visualisations in an engaging way of their choice on the 30th of November 2017.

The way forward

The hope is that this project will aid the students’ understanding of data literacy through the practical application of working with a real-world dataset and help shed new light on a little understood period of Scottish history. This, in turn, may help fuel discoveries by dint of surfacing this data and linking it with other related datasets across the UK, across Europe and beyond. As the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft’s website states itself “Our list of people involved in the prosecution of witchcraft suspects can now be used as the basis for further inquiry and research.“ The power of linked open data to share knowledge between different institutions, between geographically and culturally separated societies, and between languages is a beautiful thing. Here’s to many more Wikidata in the Classroom assignments.

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