Why Digital Humanities + Wikimedia
Ever wondered how Wikimedia projects could accompany Digital Humanities studies. Here are a few thoughts how to connect with Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, WIkidata and beyond. Feel free to add you own thoughts!
Wikidata can store the humanities data from across academic projects[edit]
Graduate students could actively curate sections of Wikidata related to their field of research: for example, improving the data for Adaptations of William Shakespeare, would provide an invaluable cross-disciplinary location for that collective scholarship to live, instead of all over the ecoystem.
DH Projects (and GLAMs Projects) Using Wikidata[edit]
| No. | Projects | Category | Source Types | Description | User-Centric Approach | Tech-Centric Approach | Organisation(s) | Region | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Neonion annotation tool | digital humanities | Paper
Müller-Birn, C., Klüwer, T., Breitenfeld, A., Schlegel, A. and Benedix, L. (2015), “neonion: Combining Human and Machine Intelligence”, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Vol. 2015-, ACM, pp. 223–226. Heftberger, A., Höper, J., Müller-Birn, C., & Walkowski, N.-O. (2020). Opening up Research Data in Film Studies by Using the Structured Knowledge Base Wikidata. Digital Cultural Heritage, 401–410. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15200-0_27 |
A prototype of annotation software in aiding scholarly reading which uses Wikidata as a knowledge base to match the annotation with | Data Consumption | knowledge base | Institute of Computer Science at the Free University of Berlin | Germany | http://neonion.org/ |
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Wikicite is a project to formalize citations[edit]
Wikicite allows us to represent relationships between scholarship (works, cite works, and those works are the presence). It is a data driven way for doing intellectual history in an unprecedented way, where the data sets can be shared and reused.
Visualizing with maps and graphs[edit]
As collaborative map and graph making becomes possible within the Wikimedia ecosystem, there will be a free and open way to refine visualizations of the humanities. See for example the List of most expensive paintings.
Centralizing crowdsourcing efforts[edit]
By making available open source tools for analyzing historical documents and inviting both the scholarly and hobbyist participants, it is possible to unlock vast amounts of historical data. Imagine an open forum for making sense of old maps, photographs or written documents.
Wikipedia as a hub for collective scholarship[edit]
Wikipedia is the only place where like-minded researchers can ensure a more complete record of the research materials. For example, this research guide, compiled by the State Library of New South Wales just keeps growing: The List of Australian diarists of World War I gets 400-500 views a month .
Wikipedia is a place to practice DH Pedagogy[edit]
The Wikipedia Education Program provides a well tested curriculum for engaging students in representing the humanities on a public platform. Students practice not only their humanities research skills, but learn how peer review, community expectations, and other academic processes work. Students also get exposure to how a fundamental Web 2.0 technology, a Wiki, can be used to connect different kinds of the expert knowledge.