08/08, 1:30 م–1:55 م (Poland), Lviv (21+22+23) (interpretation)
اللغة: English
India’s dominant caste groups have historically governed how art and artists are documented publicly in authoritative texts. As this issue proliferates in digital praxis, information about most of the country’s artists and artisans from lowered castes is undocumented or erased. Since Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects allow only conventional citations, adding marginalised artists’ data into authority control databases is an interim solution until the caste system is entirely abolished. Collaborating with the Getty Research Institute, I created nearly 700 artists’ Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) records. Over 20,000 more new records are underway.
GLAM institutions across the Majority World often do not host authority control data on various subjects in modern, organised and open ways. Some carried the legacy of colonial-era systems or were newly formed, and many are yet to have publicly accessible publications on notable personalities, works, places and other subjects. With the Indian federal and provincial state agencies being independent, authority data is absent for many subjects, while it is well-structured for a few. Historically, many state entities have failed to curate data systematically: there are cases of casual link rots, public access level change, and the complete deletion of valuable data. Hence, mirroring data in reliable places is critical when public institutions publish data openly.
A comprehensive list of visual artists from Odisha, an Indian state with a population of 45 million, was unavailable until early 2016 when Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi, a public institution for visual arts, published a visual artist directory. Rakesh Ratan Nath, one of the artists listed in this list of 700, led the compilation. There were only 30 odd Wikidata entries, a handful citing external authority identifiers, and fewer Wikipedia articles about artists from this list. Upon contacting the Getty Research Institute, which maintains the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), arguably the most authoritative directory for visual artists’ data, it became clear that submission of biographical data about these artists with some addition and clean-up would be the way forward for creating ULAN records. O Foundation, an Indian non-profit I co-founded, and the Institute entered into a collaboration to further this.
The pre-submission preparation, lasting over a year, started with Wikidata de-duplication and creation of new entries using the open source tool, OpenRefine. I added more information and citations to the Wikidata entries for additional biographical data or citation availability. Being a native speaker of Odia, Odisha’s official language, I manually added the gender data based on first names since there was no name with gender ambiguity. I researched published and reliable resources for ethnicity and other cultural backgrounds and included them when available. The Akademi listing was sufficient to create ULAN-style short biographies such as “Indian painter, contemporary” and equivalent Wikidata Properties, as well as native language labels for all the artists’ names. The submitted dataset had four external references: the Akademi and Nath as the original compiler, Wikidata QIDs, and a unique identifier after de-duplication, data cleaning and enhancement. The entire dataset was ingested, and new data, including ULAN identifiers, were created. I later updated Wikidata entries with the same. With that, with no Wikidata entry, there are nearly 700 potential Wikipedia articles with authority control data.
A new and larger project of 20,000+ new ULAN records about Odishan artisans is underway. The availability of citable linked-data clubbed with community interest would hopefully expand public knowledge on notable artisans.
Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/EYYQ-zBqY8s?si=UsgY02-Ry3LEPKxs&t=13132
This project results from a collaboration between a noted GLAM institution and a nonprofit led by Wikimedians. The outcomes are public and open data, helping expand the scope of Wikidata and Wikipedia with an added layer of citations. Most importantly, there is a lot of potential to collaborate in the future so that communities in different parts of the world could lead similar initiatives, and this session could be a great place to start conversations around those open collaborations.
ما هو مستوى الخبرة المطلوب للجمهور لحضور جلستكم؟ سيظهر هذا علنًا. –Everyone can participate in this session
كيف تخططون لتقديم هذه الجلسة؟ سيُطلب منكم تأكيد هذا قرب تاريخ المؤتمر في حالة تغير –Onsite in Katowice
ما هي الإطارات أو المواضيع الأخرى التي تندرج في جلستكم؟ يرجى الاختيار من القائمة أدناه. سيظهر هذا علنًا. –Collaboration
Subhashish Panigrahi has been a long-term Wikimedian since 2011, the co-founder of Wikimedia affiliate the Odia Wikimedians User Group, and has served the Wikimedia and open knowledge community in professional roles through past leadership roles at Wikimedia Foundation and the Centre for Internet Society's Access to Knowledge, a Wikimedia affiliate. He is a senior civil society leader, filmmaker and researcher, a current board member at the international citizen journalism nonprofit Global Voices and a global network representative for India at Creative Commons. Since 2017, he has catalysed open knowledge/source contributor communities across Asia-Pacific at the Internet Society, in Asia at Mozilla, and in South Asia at the Wikimedia Foundation and the Centre for Internet & Society. In 2023, the 72K transcripted audio recordings in Odia he published under a universal Public Domain release were arguably the largest voice data repository in any South Asian language of that kind. While initiating several open access/knowledge movement ventures, I have created over 5K Wikipedia articles.