GLAM/Newsletter/July 2019/Contents/UK report
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Oxford and Coventry Updates
Oxford
A data set about 97 astrolabes in the Adler Planetarium in Chicago was added to Wikidata this month and one image of each astrolabe was shared on Commons. The Astrolabe Explorer application is better as a result: in the entries for Khalil Muhammad ibn Hasan Ali and Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Battuti you can see works they have created from multiple collections.
Martin gave a one-hour guest lecture at the Digital Humanities in Oxford Summer School on "Knowledge Representation the Easy Way" (slides on Google Drive). An audience of eighty people — mainly postgraduates and early career researchers in humanities — saw how Wikidata can provide data sets, visualisations and code samples about people, places or artworks of interest. A lot of the session was taken up with a demonstration of Mix'n'Match, showing how anyone, by matching identifiers like the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire or the Pleiades index of the ancient world, can help humanities research.
At a separate event, Martin gave a lecture on "Wikidata for GLAMs" to library and museum staff in Oxford (slides on Google Drive). Seventeen attendees saw how Wikidata can be used to connect museum collections with other sources of information such as the Benezit Dictionary of artists, and how sharing collections data on Wikidata makes it available to lots of different applications. Martin has also been working on a final evaluation report for his Oxford placement (which is due to end on 31 October).
Coventry
Andy's residency at Coventry University began to have an impact, with out-of-copyright material, including artworks and scientific publications, sourced and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. The speaking voices of two academics were recorded and added to their Wikipedia biographies as part of the "Voice Intro Project" (#WikiVIP). Less publicly visible were the many team meetings addressed by Andy, as he establishes partnerships in the university's four faculties and other departments, for project work later in the residency. Andy also took time out to teach a Wikipedia course at the Polytechnic University of Milan and to speak at a symposium at the University of Heidelberg - see Italy report and Germany report for details.
