GLAM/Newsletter/August 2019/Contents/Finland report
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Continuing our work with the Saami communities
Wikimedia Lääʹddjânnam tuãivat pukid šiõǥǥ ÕM meeraikõskksaž alggmeerai ǩiõli eeʹjj 2019!
Wikimedia Suomâ tuáivu puohháid pyeri OA almugijkoskâsâš algâaalmugkielâi ive 2019!
Wikimedia Suopma sávvá pukid buori ON:a riikkaidgaskasaš eamiálbmotgielaid jagi 2019!
Wikimedia Finland wishes everyone a wonderful UN International Year of the Indigenous Languages 2019!
August was a busy month for Wikimedia Finland, whose members racked up nearly 4500 km to work with GLAMs from Stockholm to Sevettijärvi in the north of Finland and back.
Wikimania
Wikimedia Finland was represented in Wikimania 2019 through the Saami language and culture presentations and workshops, which discussed GLAM work to some degree within the broader topics:
- A wealth of opportunities hiding in plain sight Kimberli Mäkäräinen, Susanna Ånäs
- Quality issues in the Northern Saami Wikipedia Kimberli Mäkäräinen, Astrid Carlsen
- Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. Except we’re not... Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Felix Nartey, Kimberli Mäkäräinen
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Illustration about the various details about adding new languages, many viewpoints, no overall picture
Post-Wikimania tours of Helsinki’s GLAMs
Wikimedia Finland held two tours of Helsinki for people coming from Wikimania. The first tour was a photography walk from Senate Square through the Finnish National Library, the Helsinki University Main Library in Kaisa-talo, and Helsinki Central Station on our way to Helsinki Central Library Oodi. The unplanned highlight of the trip was the VRwandlung event at Oodi. This was an interactive installation where one appears in the middle of the action as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa transforms into a huge insect.
The next day, we attended a guided tour of Finland’s Parliament House with another group of people from Wikimania. As the tour took place during the Parliament’s summer break, we were able to take photographs without people in them. After the tour, we had lunch at Oodi. The Finto team from the National Library of Finland invited us to visit the library. After the tour of the old library building, the group split and we had a meeting discussing the use of Wikidata and Wikibase with the team. At the same time part of the group checked out the From Dice to Bytes – 200 years of Finnish Gaming exhibition.
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Wikimedians looking at the statue of Alexander II of Russia -
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Fresco ceiling of the National Library of Finland
Õõutveäkka — celebrating 70 years of the Skolt Saami in Sevettijärvi
After World War II, the Skolt communities were evacuated from the traditional areas they had lived in, when these areas were ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union. They were resettled in the areas surrounding Lake Inari in 1949, one of which is Sevettijärvi. Every 10 years, the Skolt community organizes an event to mark this anniversary. This year marks the 70th anniversary of their resettlement. The Skolts were joined by other Saami communities and Orthodox Christians from other communities as well.
Wikimedia Finland had been invited by the Secretary General of the Skolt Sámi Cultural Foundation to hold a depict-a-thon at the event on August 24. There are numerous photos of Skolt families in Commons from before their resettlement, but most of the captions on these photos are poor at best. Our idea was to add new captions and to improve old ones with the goal of giving the community back the power to decide what information and what kind of information should be displayed with these images. In addition, we were prepared to digitize new material. Some translations of Wikidata concepts were made at the event, like with the young girls who added translations into Saami for some of the Moomin characters or another person who added the Saami equivalents for fox.
As 2019 is the UN’s international year of the indigenous language, we had decided to honor the event with a special sticker that employs traditional Skolt beadwork patterns with text in Skolt Saami wishing everyone a happy year of the indigenous language 2019.
We shared our long table with the magnificent language specialists from Giellagáldu, a language-resource center for the Saami languages jointly financed by the Saami parliaments of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, who patiently taught us to pronounce the word for sticker in various Saami languages. These were also entered in Wikidata. At the other end of the table, the Saami Youth council were making badges, and we had the opportunity to create one of our sticker.
We spent a lot of time discussing the Wiki Loves Monuments contest and the selection of cultural heritage items in the context of the Finnish competition’s theme this year, the Sacred Place. We also had the chance of discussing some aspects of our work with the presidents of the Norwegian and Finnish Saami Parliaments.
Meeting GLAMs in Inari
On August 26, we met up with representatives of the Saami Archives in Finland and Siida, the National Museum of the Finnish Sámi, to discuss mutual interests. We hope to initiate activities that make use of Wikidata for language revitalisation and to develop practices of opening indigenous content in respectful ways on Wikimedia platforms. This can include taking personality rights more into consideration as well as limiting the distribution of certain materials based on otherwise unprotected community protocols.
Problematic Data Workshop for GLAMs in Stockholm
Susanna presented ideas from our previous work and discussions with the Saami communities at the Workshop on Problematic data in Stockholm on August 30. The workshop brought together practitioners from Swedish GLAMs to share their experiences working with compelling content in a workshop setting. Although we are not yet in the position to present results, we were able to display the directions which we have to chosen to follow. One of them is to advance tools and best practices to work with personality rights in Wikimedia projects, and we set up a new Telegram channel for it with the participants of the breakout group.
Wiki Loves Monuments in Finland
The theme of the year in Finland is Sacred Place, which has shifted the focus of the competition to archaelogical sites and religious buildings. We have invited two mentors to join us. They will write about the topic in Wikimedia Finland's blog during the competition and participate as jury members. Mari Korpimäki is the Secretary General of the Skolt Sámi Cultural Foundation and Reetta Karhunkorva works as Senior Forest Culture Specialist at the Finnish Forest Museum Lusto.
The Finnish competition also features two rephotography series: the series Lost Places and Buildings covers the whole country, while the images by the photographer Signe Brander are being rephotographed in a series focusing on Helsinki.
As part of Wikimedia Finland’s outreach to better include the Saami- and Swedish-speaking communities in Finland, the Wiki Loves Monuments website has been translated into Northern Saami, Inari Saami, Skolt Saami, and Swedish for the first time.
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Kanavaranta 1, Helsinki 1918 -
Kanavaranta 1, Helsinki 2019
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Kajaaninkatu 6, Helsinki 1976 -
Kajaaninkatu 6, Helsinki 2019
The Sacred Place workshop at the Finnish Museum of Photography
Wikimedia Finland organized a workshop and public discussion at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki as part of the Wiki Loves Monuments program on September 5. The discussion addressed images depicting indigenous communities entering the public domain, how community control is lost, and how it could be regained. Mari Korpimäki, the mentor in the WLM competition and Secretary General of Skolt Sámi Cultural Foundation; Marja Helander, a renowned Saami visual artist; and Tarmo Toikkanen, a copyright specialist chairing Open Knowledge Finland and Creative Commons Finland were invited to discuss different aspects of this question.
Mari Korpimäki started the discussion by unfolding the story of an image of her Skolt relatives. The family had been shocked to find the image painted as a 7-story high mural in the Finnish city of Turku by an artist who claimed it conveyed a special local feeling, which was absurd considering that the photo was taken in the far northeast corner of Finland before World War II. In the discussion that followed, Anni Wallenius from the Finnish Museum of Photography was able to shed light on the circumstances under which the image had been made openly available. Kimberli Mäkäräinen brought up another example of the same set of images where one of the images had been colorized and copyrighted by an artist and sold as phone covers and printed bags.
Marja Helander, who showed her early works depicting her relatives, reminded us about the principle Nothing about them without them.
Tarmo Toikkanen introduced us to the principles of the General Data Protection Regulation, which may be too restricting in masking out images depicting ethnicity on one hand and powerless to limit the reuse of images depicting the deceased on the other. In the end, we discussed if Traditional Knowledge labels could be used to limit access to sensitive content.
At the end of the event, Kimmo gave a presentation on rephotography. It was raining so we did not go outside to rephotograph, but instead continued the discussion on the open content for about 1 hour until the museum closed.
The discussion will continue among the Finnish GLAMs. The first outcome is that the openness organizations Wikimedia Finland and AvoinGLAM of Open Knowledge Finland will have a common representative in the Finnish LAM jurisprudence group and can jointly develop the theme of “The Right to be Remembered”.
