Grants:TPS/Sic19/LODLAM2017/Report

Event name

LODLAM Summit 2017 in Venice, Italy on 28 – 29 June 2017.

Participant connections

The LODLAM Summit is an unconference and therefore the delegates set the agenda by ‘pitching’ their session proposals. This format ensures that those issues which the attendees consider to be important and interesting will be subject to discussion; it was fantastic to have four breakouts dedicated to Wikidata.

Jason.nlw made the first Wikidata pitch and the session took place on the morning of day one. This breakout was a general discussion of Wikidata that began with an overview of the work at the National Library of Wales to enrich their collections with Wikidata, including my Visiting Scholar project. It was also an opportunity for other delegates to share their projects and to ask questions.
My breakout session is described below.
Acka47 ran a practical editing workshop focusing on the description of datasets, projects and websites in Wikidata. It was useful to consider the conceptual difficulties that we encounter when creating items to represent these resources and events in a multilingual knowledgebase while editing items related to LODLAM.
YULdigitalpreservation facilitated a breakout on property creation in Wikidata to discuss the property proposal process and related issues, such as the necessity of any new property and whether existing properties can be used to model a concept satisfactorily. As a result of this session, I am trying to become more actively involved in property proposal discussions and voting.

In addition to the sessions focusing specifically on Wikidata, I also attended a particularly worthwhile session on politics and ethics in linked open data that Smallison organised to discuss the description of archival collections related to indigenous communities and engagement with these communities.

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

On the morning of day two, I pitched and facilitated a session to explore the potential for collaboration between institutions on Wikidata projects. Approximately twenty people attended and a lively discussion ensued, which covered topics including the need to make our projects more visible, produce better documentation of our objectives and outcomes, improve reporting and create guidelines. Questions were raised about whether it is necessary to have some sort of structure to make collaboration viable, what we might what to achieve as a cultural sector, and how we can link our data together in a standardised format. Suggested foci for collaboration included projects related to underrepresented communities, and work to improve Wikidata items, such as creators (i.e. authors, artists etc.), which can be used to enrich existing metadata. It was agreed that we will use the Wikidata cultural heritage project page to share and discuss our projects. The notes from this breakout session are available here.

A few weeks before the LODLAM Summit, I was invited to contribute to a linked open data tutorial session at the DSDH-17: Data Sharing, Holocaust Documentation and the Digital Humanities international workshop that was held in Venice on 29-30 June 2017 in conjunction with LODLAM. The slides from my presentation entitled An introduction to Wikidata for sharing and visualising cultural heritage resources have been shared via Commons.

Finances

Flights: 183.47 GBP
Conference fees: 83.41 GBP
Total: 266.88 GBP

Amount left over

The initial grant was for 280 GBP of which 13.12 GBP is unspent.

Anything else

Notes from my breakout session on Wikidata collaboration are available here.
The slides from my presentation at DSDH-17 are on Wikimedia Commons.