(moderator) Welcome to this session here this afternoon.
And now we have a talk from Jason Evans,
who is the National Wikimedian of Wales,
and he'll give a presentation about Wikidata in Welsh Biographies.
The talk will be 20 minutes, and we have a Q&A session afterwards.
Thank you very much.
Yes. So, I want to talk generally
about how Wikidata is working in GLAMs in Wales.
And then I really want to focus on the journey that we've taken
with the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
and how we've initially shared data with Wikidata,
and then how we are using this data now to actually enrich our own services.
So like many people, like many institutions,
our kind of journey with Wikidata began as a result of sharing images
to Wikimedia Commons.
We've shared a lot, we've shared about 17,000 digital images now
to Wikimedia Commons.
We kind of found that Commons didn't allow us to share really rich data
about the images,
and we had quite good metadata for a lot of these collections,
and so we turned to Wikidata to share that data in a structured way
that we felt was going to provide more value for our users
than just putting it on Commons.
But we've gone on to share data
about lots of different types of collection.
And I did a count the other day,
and there is now nearly 50,000 Wikidata items
that are either directly about something in our collection
or have some kind of National Library of Wales identifier on them.
So, we've got this growing sort of corpus of data
that we've been sharing on Wikidata.
And I'll sort of go through some of the advantages
that we've seen of doing that,
and showing lots of different types of collections
as I go along.
So, another type of data that we've been sharing recently--
we did a project around a manuscript collection that we've got.
And this is a collection of medieval Welsh manuscripts.
There are 560 volumes in the collection.
And we took the metadata for that collection,
and we took actually text descriptions,
that were in all sort of dumped into a metadata field,
and broke it down as much as we could,
using filters and refining the text to actually pull out data
and make structured data for these manuscripts.
And you can kind of see from the visualization
the kind of data that we now have access to,
through doing that.
So, we can see a lot more than just information
about the manuscript itself.
We can access data about the individual works
that are contained within the manuscripts.
We can see the history of the ownership of the collection, for example.
So, there are lots of different data that we can access through doing that.
And this collection in particular really highlights the research potential.
We've been able to do really interesting queries
and identify some really interesting patterns in the data,
like pulling together all the scribes
that worked on the same manuscript, for example.
And some really interesting data queries that we can do
that we just simply couldn't do before when this was metadata.
Another project that we've worked on
is sharing data for every library in Wales.
And we worked with Simon, one of our volunteers,
and we worked with CILIP,
the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals,
and they actually shared all the data that they had for public libraries,
academic libraries, health libraries.
And this now is the front page of the main website for Welsh Libraries.
And as you can see, we have a Wiki-Map on that page that has all the libraries.
They are color-coded by the authorities that run the libraries,
and you can access their websites directly through the links on that map.
So, you're really starting to see Wikidata becoming embedded in the GLAM sector
in the work that we're doing in Wales.
And we're now--
as a result of this sort of engaging with the library community,
we're now getting calls to actually work
with universities and colleges that train librarians
to provide Wikidata training for all new librarians,
which is something I am quite excited about, trying to roll out.
And then on the subject of books,
we are currently, as some of you may know,
trying to share bibliographic data for the Welsh bibliography.
So, we're starting with the kind of the easiest 50,000 items
in that collection--
I'm looking at the most popular publishers, for example.
And so with the help again of Simon who's sitting at the back over there,
we have been sharing these records of books.
We've got about 25,000 items now, either about the editions, the works,
the publishers, the authors--
so we're really excited about the kind of potential
that we're going to see from sharing all these data.
And this, I should say as well, with the books--
it's part of a Welsh government-funding project.
So they are funding these projects now.
And in the Welsh government strategy for the Welsh language--
if you look under the kind of digital aspect,
it explicitly states that they support Wikipedia,
and they use Wikidata to spread knowledge of the Welsh language
and to share information in the Welsh language.
So then we get to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
This is a collection of around 5,000 biographies
about Wales' most important and notable people.
And it began as a series of volumes in the 1930s,
and it's constantly being added to over time.
There is still an editorial board,
and there are new articles being produced monthly.
So, for many years, the only way of accessing these biographies
was to read a book--
which isn't very trendy these days.
So, in 2004,
this dataset or these articles were made available online
for the first time.
And I managed to use the Wayback Machine to get a screenshot
of this amazing website from 2004,
when we first made the stuff available online.
And this was all about reaching a wider audience
and engaging with more people.
So the website has been through several iterations
over the last 15 years.
This is the latest version
of the Dictionary of Welsh Biography website
that was launched last year.
As you can see, it looks a lot more modern,
it's kind of adaptable for mobile and all the rest of it.
But, actually, the functionality of this website
has changed very little in those 15 years.
You can do it a full-text search of the articles.
You can search by an A to Z list of authors and subjects.
And you can do a couple of very simple filters.
So, this is really quite limiting in terms of the way
you can actually browse and discover the content in the collection.
So, in 2015, one of the first things we did with Wikidata
was put very basic data about the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
into the Mix'n'match tool.
So, we had a team of about 20 volunteers
that on and off were working on doing the Mix'n'match process
in the library,
and also there's other Wikidata volunteers
who were kindly sort of helping as we went along.
Once we'd done all the Mix'n'match
we added all the people who weren't yet in Wikidata,
and then over the last few years,
we gradually have been kind of going through this text files
that we have on this website
and extracting more and more information, sometimes quite manually,
sometimes we were able to kind of semi-automate that process.
So things like places of birth, dates of birth,
places of education, the religion of the people,
related family members,
and adding all these extra data into Wikidata.
And we've also been, as we were going along,
making sure that all these items have Welsh language labels.
But not just the items itself, we'll do like a SPARQL query and say,
"Show me all the occupations
that are attached to people in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
and then we'll make sure that all those occupations
have Welsh language labels."
And we do the same for places of birth and death, for example.
So that users can actually access and use all the information
attached to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography people in Welsh.
So, this is an example of the kind of data that we've now got
for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
So, there is some really good information here.
Now, in the articles, for example, it will say this person
was educated at the University of Glasgow, the University of Swansea.
But, of course, what you get through Wikidata
is all the information associated with that university,
so you can find out the location of it,
you can take the coordinates and reuse those,
you can see types of occupations,
you can group them by different things,
you can seek connected family members--
so there is a lot of extra information that we can pull back
from Wikidata as a result of this sharing.
And that allows us to start doing
some really interesting queries on the data.
So we've been, over time, kind of trying out different queries.
This one, for example, is plotting birthplaces--
it's quite dark on the screen.
There is a map of the world under there.
So, this is like the birthplace of everyone.
You can see Wales is there, basically.
And then the place of occupation for all the Christian missionaries
in the collection.
So you can see that they were working all over the world.
It's a really nice way of kind of demonstrating
the reach and the impact that those people had.
Now, we can do things like look at the average lifespan
of people with different occupations in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, Welsh princes and kings
did not last very long
and they probably didn't die a natural death either.
Also, lawyers and translators, interestingly-- very short lifespan.
And on the other end of the spectrum, you have genealogists,
hymn writers, and antiquarians,
who were more likely to live to kind of the age of 70.
So, the idea is that you can do some really interesting queries.
And the structured nature of Wikidata
means that we're actually starting to join up
all these collections that we've shared to Wikidata,
including the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
So, we've now made connections
between the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
and the sitters in portraits, for example, the artists of portraits.
Scribes of manuscripts, authors of books,
booksellers, printers, all these different kind of people
that exist in different datasets in our collections
are now being all drawn together
in one kind of interconnected web of collections.
And it's not just our own collections that we're joining together.
Wikidata is allowing us to connect to collections
in other institutions as well.
So, looking at the external identifiers
for the people in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
we can see that over 1,000 of them
also have an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry.
400 or more have archives at the National Library.
We can connect to portraits of these people
in the National Portrait Gallery.
We can even see who's been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
So, Wikidata is actually helping us to connect with this growing web
of cultural data from around the world,
with kind of Wikidata acting as this central hub
to pull all these collections together.
So, the next step for us was obviously,
"Well, how can we reuse all this cool data
that we've now got connected to our collections?"
So when we launched the new edition
of the Welsh Biography website last year,
we started including information that comes directly from Wikidata,
and I've highlighted here--
this is the kind of further reading section
at the bottom of an article.
We've pulled in information about Oxford Dictionary of Biography,
the Wikipedia article.
We linked directly to the Wikidata item for the person.
And we can start linking to external IDs such as VIAF.
And, as you saw on the previous slide,
there are loads of other things that we could add for our users,
and connections that we could give them,
so that they can link out to external resources.
And we've been trying to maintain a kind of community engagement element
of all this work, as well.
So, for example, once all this information is connected with Wikidata,
it's really easy for us to draw up lists of people
that don't yet have Wikipedia articles in English and Welsh.
So, we've been running continuous events
and volunteer projects
to actually fill in those gaps-- those missing people on Wikipedia.
So, then, we started thinking
and looking at how cool Histropedia was
and thinking, "How can we use all this data that we've shared,
all the open images that we've shared
and that other people have shared on Commons
that could be used to illustrate the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
all the Wikipedia articles
that our wonderful volunteers have been creating?"
"How can we link that all together in a kind of discovery interface
that really adds value to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography?"
And Histropedia seemed like a really good tool
that would be a really good fit for this.
So, I did a kind of a mock-up of how something like this might look,
and we set about looking for funding to try and make this a reality.
And the main aim was really-- of doing this would be
to create a really interactive way
for people to search the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
that isn't just picking a name off a list.
To give people a way of querying the data
without even knowing that they're writing a query--
you know, it's all very well if you know SPARQL,
to do interesting queries on this data,
but through having a series of filters on a timeline,
you can actually do queries without the need for any SPARQL skills.
We wanted to connect, we have 5,000 portraits
that we wanted to share to Commons,
and we knew that a lot of them would connect
and illustrate people in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
so we wanted that to be part of the project.
And finally, we wanted to make as much of the code available as possible,
for any product that we made,
so that other people could use that as a framework
for building their own timelines on their own collections.
So, last year, we were very lucky and very grateful
to receive some funding from the My-D Foundation in Switzerland.
And we got support from the National Library of Wales.
And we formed a partnership with Histropedia,
and we set about building this timeline that we had envisaged
that really pulls together all the elements of the data
that we'd been sharing, the articles we've been creating,
and giving people really added value to the website.
So, we have an early version of this timeline,
and you guys are amongst the first people to see this--
it's not live on the website, but we feel like we're getting close.
And we're really excited about launching this
on the Dictionary of Welsh Biography website.
So, you can see here we have an interactive timeline
we can switch back and forth
and see everyone in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
As you zoom in, you get more entries.
And when we click someone,
you can instantly link
to their Dictionary of Welsh Biography article.
So, if we scroll down-- there we are.
So, you get the text of the Dictionary of Welsh Biography article,
and you can also link to the Wikipedia article
so that you can see the two and compare the two.
It's funny, sometimes you have a tiny article on Wikipedia
but a really detailed one on the Welsh Biography.
Sometimes it's the other way around--
the Welsh Biography article might have been written in 1940,
and then you have a really good up-to-date Wikipedia article,
and the two, I feel, kind of complement each other.
We can also do a search of the timeline.
So if you wanted to look for a particular person,
you can just search for them
and pick them out on the timeline straightaway.
That's an interesting portrait, I've not come across that one.
But there's a lot more to this timeline
than just being able to sort of swoosh through and select people.
Firstly, we can add layers of data on top of it.
So the items that you see in black now
are a curated set of events, related,
that were important in Welsh history.
So that we can give some context
to the lives of the people that you're seeing on the timeline
by putting in important dates, like the foundation of universities,
or we've got here the composition of the National Anthem.
And we can click these items,
and we can link to their Wikipedia articles as well
so that you can see information about them.
And we can see all this in Welsh.
And there was actually-- when we came to do the translation of the interface,
there was only really a handful of things that we needed to translate
because Wikidata has translations for everything already.
So it saved us a lot of time.
Is it going to load?
Okay.
Well-- there is a Welsh version.
(laughs)
I'm not sure why it didn't want to load.
Just trust me-- it's there.
Cool. And then we get to the really powerful thing
and the bit I am most excited about with this timeline--
and that's the filters.
So, you can apply all sorts of filters to this timeline.
So, if you want to just get rid of all the pesky men, for example,
we can do that.
The timeline does become quite sparse,
which is something that we are working on with the Dictionary of Welsh Biography
to try and get more content.
Oh, I've picked all the men rather than all the women.
Sorry!
There we go.
So you can just get all the women on the timeline.
But you can do more than just add a single filter.
You can add multiple filters.
So if I wanted to search for all the politicians--
that's great, so we get them, we get all the politicians,
and there are lots of those, if we zoom in, you can see.
But then, I can filter this further,
and I can look for all the politicians that were born in Aberystwyth,
which is my hometown.
And we can filter just down to them.
So if you kind of-- for teachers, for example,
being able to filter to a very defined set of results
is something that could be really useful.
And I'll show you another interesting query
that I quite like--
so you can search by given name and family name.
So if we search for everyone who has the first name John
and the last name Jones,
there are 82 John Jones in this set of data.
And that gives you some idea of the disambiguation challenges we have
when we're working on this kind of data.
So, yeah. There's a lot of John Joneses.
There you go, they just keep coming.
Some of them have a middle name which is helpful,
but others don't.
And again, we could put the kind of history of Wales events
on top of that as well.
Theoretically, you could add all sorts of different layers on top of that.
We're really interested in the future in kind of adding another layer.
So if we've got archives for a person,
you can click on a person and see a timeline of the documents
that we hold for that person, for example.
There's really kind of endless possibilities
with this kind of tool.
So, I think those are the main features
of the timeline.
And, yeah. I think we'll leave it there.
And if anyone has any questions, do feel free to ask.
(moderator) Thank you very much.
(woman 1) I was wondering, when you said you're working with them
to increase the number of women biographies,
how exactly are you doing it?
Okay. So, I've actually managed to kind of worm my way
into the internal committee for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
and also I attend the Advisory Board Meetings.
So Wikidata makes it very easy to highlight the issue with gender.
And it's something that they are aware of.
So there's a few things they're doing.
They've now committed to producing--
they'll only publish 50-50 from now on.
So if they publish an article about a man,
they will next publish an article about a woman,
and they're keeping that balance.
One of the main things that we're hoping
is through first investment in the new website--
because the old one is kind of tired--
and inclusion of cool new features like the timeline
that we'll use as a base for applying for funding--
to get specific funding for research projects
so that we can commission more content about women
and just try and encourage people to write more content
and really highlight the problem that we are facing.
So that's the kind of thing that we're doing.
Any other questions?
(woman 2) How are you getting the information back in--
you said you're putting it into the online dictionary.
How are you doing that?
So on the website for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography,
we basically will, periodically,
I think it's once a month or once every three months,
we're doing a crawl with Wikidata
because obviously, we know the Q numbers now for everyone,
and we are updating the links that we have to the Wikipedia articles,
for example, and everything, kind of periodically
through the Wikidata items.
And they're just being added on to the website
as part of the data for each article.
(woman 2) Manually or some sort of automated process?
No. It's kind of automated.
We've got a little script that we'll go and pull in all the relevant data
and just add it automatically to all of the articles.
(moderator) Further questions?
Then, again, thank you very much for your talk.
Thank you.
(applause)