GLAM/Newsletter/May 2024/Contents/Portugal report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue V, May 2024

Portugal report

The Search for the Lost Manuscripts

The Search for the Lost Manuscript: the world is such a small place

In November 2023, Rute Correia (WMPT Program Manager for GLAM Partnerships) participated in GLAM Wiki 2023 in Uruguay, where she met User:Bodhisattwa from the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group (WBG). During their meeting, Bodhisattwa mentioned that there were some manuscripts in Portugal they were very interested in, and Rute offered to see if Wikimedia Portugal could help in acquiring those manuscripts and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.

The manuscript in question is a book written by Dom Antonio, titled Brahman Roman Catholic Sambad. Dom Antonio de Rozario, prince of Bhushsna, was born in circa 1643 in a jomidar family of Bhushana in the Jessore-Faridpur areas. In 1663 he was kidnapped by Portuguese Pirates and later rescued by a Portuguese priest named Manoel de Rozario, who converted him to Christianity. The book contained a religious debate between a Brahmin and a Roman Catholic. The book was translated into Portuguese by Manuel da Assumpção and the translated book was published by Francisco Da Silva from Lisbon in 1743. Dom Antonio de Rozario is considered the first writer of Bangla prose.

After the meeting, she returned to Portugal and engaged with Wikimedia Portugal and the Évora Public Library, where those manuscripts were stored. Unfortunately, other issues came along, and the project was stalled for a few weeks.

At the end of April, Berlin was the epicenter of the Wikimedia Movement. I attended the Wikimedia Summit 2024, and while having breakfast alone at the hotel, two unknown individuals sat at my table. As they were talking to the table next to us, I noticed an amazing coincidence on their credentials: West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. All I had to say was, Are you searching for some lost manuscripts in Évora? and a new chapter in this history was opened!

The manuscript was in the Évora Public Library, where, two weeks before, we had held WikiCon Portugal, allowing us to discuss this in depth with the library. Two weeks later, I returned to Évora to participate in the Drupal Iberia Conference, so I scheduled a day beforehand and went to the library, prepared to scan the manuscript if needed. Finally, in May 2024, the digitized copies were in my possession! With so many things to do, only two weeks later I was able to treat and upload some images. At that time, I was attending Wikimedia Europe General Assembly in Prague, and used some free time in the morning of the return flight to compile and upload the generated pdf.

A new chapter is starting now. The file now deserves a Wikisource project, where the collaboration of Wikimedia Portugal and West Bengal Wikimedians User Group will be fundamental to transliterate and translate the content, and later reuse it. This might also be the first of many partnerships among West Bengal Wikimedians User Group and Wikimedia Portugal.

Wikimedia technologies as baseline tools in academia

For some time that Wikimedia Portugal and CODA-FLUP (Centre for Digital Culture and Innovation of Humanity Faculty of Porto University) are exploring new ways of using our technology in academy, and in May we held a small pilot project exploring the use of MediaWiki as a tool for internal works repository, and how we could integrate it with Wikimedia Projects. An internal MediaWiki was set up, where students from a class on Art History wrote their assignments about Porto Baroque monuments, and the professor reviewed and validate the content. The result was a set of articles with academic review that can be used as reference. Parallel to this, images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, leading to more than 200 images uploaded, and a set of structured data.

The results were promising, and we are moving to a more structured phase.