Right! Hello, everyone!
The clock is running.
Thank you to Wikidata for the opportunity to speak here today.
I will be talking about reinstating female artists to the cultural record.
First off, what am I doing here?
I work for an organization called digiS,
which is the Forschungs-und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung Berlin
We are a state-funded body.
We're based in the Zuse Institute in Berlin.
which is part of the high-performance computing network in Germany.
We are involved with GLAMs, with cultural institutions in Berlin,
helping them get their analog treasures online,
digitized online, making high-quality metadata.
And one of our major focuses is also long-term digital preservation.
So, we assist them with all of that,
And as I said, it's state-funded,
and with a focus on Berlin,
so we work with Berlin institutions.
Our standard operating procedure
is that we take the metadata
that the cultural institutions have produced
and that is ingested into the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.
That's our main focus.
And then on into Europeana if the metadata is appropriately licensed.
Not all the institutions put out their metadata with CC0.
But that's our standard route.
But we're always looking at new ways to present data,
because a lot of the museums and cultural institutions we work with,
archives as well,
sometimes focus a bit too much on putting the data on a website.
You've got to realize that we're dealing with institutions,
sometimes very small institutions in Berlin,
where there's just one or two people working.
They're really happy if they've just got a website.
If we start coming to them and saying, "Hey! Start producing your metadata
on LIDO or Metsmart or whatever," they tend to have a bit of a crisis,
but that's why we've got this funding program
to try and help them through it,
because we also would like the data that they produce
to be usable for machines,
to really leverage the power of the semantic web and link data.
Which is why we became interested in looking at Wikidata,
because some of our partners were actually using Wikidata already,
pretty much as a resource.
They weren't inputting any data, but to make their whole...
collection management easier, they would then collect to Wikidata
to save them the trouble of inputting everything
and that's how we ended up with the *Berliner Malweiber*,
as they are called.
So, *Malweiber* is a pejorative term.
It just means "Painting Women,"
and it was used to refer to women artists who were not taken seriously
by the male-dominated academe at the turn of the last century.
These were women who were painting,
but they weren't allowed to study at any universities
or any higher education institutions.
They were allowed to maybe go to painting schools,
but they were producing a lot of work.
Some of the artists that we've got in the database
are early 1850's as well, but most of it was around the turn of the century
So, this is Anna Bernhardi's self-portrait
from 1891, I think.
In Berlin, the first time women were admitted
to the Schule der Kunst was 1919.
So, it took a while before they got any recognition
for the work that they were doing.
So, the Stadtmuseum in Berlin, in 2016, had a temporary exhibition
called "Berlin -- Stadt der Frauen,"
where they tried to readdress this imbalance a bit
and to showcase a lot of the work that they have--
the Stadtmuseum has their artworks--
and to actually put on an exhibition for them.
Of the 20 women who remained the focus of the exhibition,
most of them are already quite famous,
but there were still quite a few artworks in the museum
that are from lesser-known artists.
And that's why, as part of this program--
this is the website from digiS--
there was a program in 2016 or a project by the Stadtmuseum
to then digitize a further 215 of their paintings
and produce metadata to that.
So, that was the basis of our work.
So, standard operating procedure:
we announced the ingest on the Wikidata Import website.
It was actually the old site. They've changed the way now.
And happily...
...cleaned up the data as much as they could in OpenRefine
because I was dealing with a dataset that had been edited
by about three different employees of the museum.
So, you notice immediately how great it would be
if people would use controlled vocabularies and stuff like that
because for materials and techniques there were very often different words used
to describe exactly the same concept.
I did a whole lot of cleaning up,
checked for which artists were already existing in Wikidata,
which had to be added new.
All of this was uploaded, and then tragedy struck,
because for a lot of these artists I had no external references.
I do not have any reference in the GND, the German Authority Control.
And so, the only place I could enter their data was in Wikidata.
They didn't exist anywhere else.
And Wikidata admin, quite rightly, deleted 23 of the artists
that I had added, by saying,
"No source, no sitelink, no backlink, no data to understand who they are."
I waited a while, then I canceled.
So, I engaged in a discussion with this admin
and he or she very kindly restored the items that had been deleted,
which gave me the opportunity to say,
"From my point of view, I did a bit of calculating back then,
I may be wrong; this is a year ago now.
There were 15 million items.
Of those, a million had been deleted.
That's about 2% of Wikidata."
[Arguing], I realized today that in the earlier session
we'd say that Wikidata was having a resource problem. Good.
We need bigger machines.
But it would be interesting to say,
maybe the notability criteria should be made even more inclusive
if it's clearly spam or vandalism-- yes, that's not an issue--
but there may be some items that are a little bit on the borderline
and maybe Wikidata would be an interesting place to store that data,
or Wikibase, if we're going to see some other options
of what we can do with it.
So, a suggestion would be to set up some sort of arbitration process,
because what annoyed me a little bit about having my items deleted
was the fact that I wasn't really given a chance to argue my case
in any way, shape, or form.
and it would have been nice if someone gave me the opportunity just to say,
"Hang on! This is actually real data," and explain the situation.
On Wikipedia, we have pages very often with a banner on the top:
"This page has some issues."
Maybe we could think of something similar for Wikidata,
but I do not know how realistic that suggestion is.
It was just something I thought that might make people be more open
to putting their work into Wikidata and not be too terrified
that their work is going to be somehow deleted at some point.
I'll just remind you what the Wikidata criteria are.
Let me scroll.
This is not my computer, and I am left-handed,
so I'm struggling here a bit.
I might just...
...use my left hand!
Let me scroll. Yes!
Ah! Of course! Windows.
There we go!
So, if it refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable concept
or material entity, the entity must be notable in the sense
that it can be described using serious and publicly available references.
So, this was part of our battle
in how can we get a reference for an artist
who was excluded by design from any formal record.
It's quite a complicated situation.
Now, how do I get out of that page?
Going back to the left hand.
Finding the mouse. Hello, mouse? Anyone seen a mouse?
(chuckles)
Ah! There we go!
Let's go back.
So, at this stage, there are still 19 artists without a GND,
so this is the German Authority Control.
So, these are all German artists, or Berlin artists as well.
So, one would hope that they would qualify for a GND ID,
but at this stage they do not have one.
I have artists, for example, like Ida Maurer-Hahn...
(humming)
There we go!
...where I can really only just say this much about her.
I know she's human, I know she's female, and I know she's a painter.
That's all I know. I'm not the domain expert.
This is data I got from the museum.
The museum is busy setting up all sorts of other things,
so it's a little bit of a battle for them too
to allocate resources to this,
and we're stuck in the middle of digiS,
trying to make sure that good quality metadata is being created,
and doing our best to ensure that it's done.
There we go!
And this is, for example, in some cases,
even though I may not have the metadata or an external reference,
I have a painting,
and I can at least link to that painting.
And for some of the paintings that are online at Stadtmuseum--
but I won't-- well, maybe we can explain this here.
This is what the metadata looks like for one of the paintings, *instance of.*
I have all the data that the museum has about this artwork;
however, I have no online link to any of this stuff.
I can't reference it
because it's in their collection management system.
It's not available online yet, so how am I going to do this?
There is hope. Do not despair!
The German Authority Control is run by the German National Library,
the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek,
and they have a project running called GND4C,
which is the GND for culture data.
And, in fact, I presented on this topic a few days ago
at the annual meeting of the expert group on documentation
of the Museums Federation of Germany,
and there were people in the audience from the GND4C
who have now said they will help me get at least these 19 artists who have no GND
to at least get their IDs, so that we can start the process of--
as it has been said in another presentation today,
the moment this data is online in Wikidata and someone does a query
and says, "Hey, here's an artist, but there's not much data about them.
Maybe there's a story to tell here, and maybe we'd be interested
in doing some research and to expand that."
That's been the amazing effect of uploading a lot of this data
when there has been IDs or there has been the ability to leverage
all the link data power,
that all of a sudden, so much more information
has been collected about these artists who in the past had really been ignored.
What are the lessons we can learn from all of this?
How can we improve on past performance?
I think it's difficult to find the right name to describe this.
There is such a thing as the Chief Data Officer.
It's very much a commercial and business enterprise sort of thing,
but what we noticed is that in the cultural and heritage institutions
which have a personnel and resource problem anyway,
we would like to have a Chief Data Officer,
at least someone who is responsible there for making sure that the metadata
is of a high standard and that it's not just--
There's a role in Germany called the *data redakteur*,
I don't know what the English translation is. I could not find it.
But someone who is mainly responsible
to make sure that there are no spelling mistakes in the data
or that it's of a relatively good quality.
But we actually need a bit more.
And a rose by any name would smell as sweet,
so I don't really care what we call it. I care more about what they do.
And what they need to do is to make strategic decisions
regarding this data usage.
Someone actually in the institution needs to sit down and say,
"It's important that we get online because..."
I unfortunately missed the presentation by The Met today
to see what they've done with their data once they've uploaded it into Wikidata.
But if we can explain to the institutions why it's important,
and they can see the reason for this,
then maybe they will be able to make funds available
or resources available to have someone to take this task
of actually realizing a museum or a cultural heritage institution
is really a data provider.
They need the architecture to provide data.
They need to know who wants to use the data.
Is it digital humanist researches? Is it just the general public?
They could have one central system
that can maybe feed into their website and also have an API.
And one of the issues with the DDB is they have an API,
so the metadata that we uploaded into the DDB can be queried by an API.
However, you need an API key before you do that.
That makes Wikidata attractive again
because I can just go to any Wikidata SPARQL endpoint
and basically do my query.
And we need to ensure high-quality data.
That’s the beginning of this whole process.
Just for the 250 artworks that I uploaded, the data took so much work
to try and massage it into a useful form that could be really great,
to ensure data quality and that would be the basic things,
the uniform measurement system and controlled vocabularies
as much as possible.
And all of this compliant with relevant metadata standards.
We always bang the drum for standards, because the moment you use standards,
you increase the ability to connect your data
to other forms of data out there.
And then to avoid some of the issues,
because I can understand that Wikidata also says,
"Look, we're not your data repository.
You can't just come here and dump your data."
And the institutions, on the other hand, say, "Look, this is our curated data.
This is stuff we spent years researching
and spent many employee hours working on.
We don't just want to upload that to Wikidata
and have it overwritten or deleted at some point."
So, I really like the idea of Wikibase.
The idea that an institution could run its own Wikidata instance,
where we really need to have a look and see if we can assist...
Where's the pointy bit?
...is in this bit here.
So, if you have an institution
that has its own collection management system,
we need to find a way, write scripts, and support it as much as possible,
to as automatically as possible get data into their local Wikibase instance
or an instance run by another government institution,
perhaps like digiS-- but I can't make that prediction at this stage--
that could then be used by Wikidata in terms of a synchronized
or a federated query.
And all of these things can, of course, then use authority controls and so on.
But if the institutions can be encouraged to set up their own Wikibases.
10-15 years ago, very few museums had their own websites.
I would hope that in five years
more institutions would have their own Wikibase
or be prepared to use a Wikibase.
And, of course, it gets interesting
when the moment you input it into a system like that,
issues with the data will arise
that you can hopefully feed back into the collection management system
to improve their data in general.
So, in other words, something like a DIY Authority Control
for the institution or even just a controlled vocabulary.
If they just had a resource within their institution
where they could say, "We're going to choose this term,
we're not going to go through a long standardization process.
Even if five years down the track
they decide it's the wrong term and they want to change the term,
at least I have a clear idea what I'm talking about."
It’s a start.
But I have to say that this suggestion that I made
was also met with quite a lot of skepticism at this conference,
because I think the people in the audience have also had bad experiences
trying to set up these systems.
And there's the saying:
"To err is human, but to really screw up, you need a computer."
So I can imagine if you've got people
trying to set up their own Wikibases, their own control vocabularies,
a lot of things are going to go wrong, but it's a learning experience.
And we hope that something good will come out of it in the end.
This is something that was referenced
in the Wikibase inspirational presentation this morning.
The GND is now cooperating with Wikimedia
to actually see how Wikibase can be used for it,
because it's part of the whole GND4C, opening the very strictly controlled
for libraries resource of the Authority Control to now say,
"Hey, other GLAMS, when you use galleries, libraries, archives, and museums,
also want to use this resource"
GND4C is trying to see how they can actually make that happen.
And one of the things they're exploring is Wikibase.
And just the last point to say,
if you're in Berlin on the 5th of December,
and you'd like to come to the digiS Annual Conference,
where every year our partners present their projects, it's fascinating.
We've got a very broad spectrum. You're welcome to come along.
Details there in German on the URL.
Thank you for your attention.
(applause)
And I'll just point out, if you want, there are some interesting readings.
This never loads for some reason,
but it’s actually an article by Linda Nochlan
about why there are no great women artists from 1971.
It was republished a few years ago, online.
The link there will work. It's a fascinating article.
*Invisible women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men*,
also fascinating.
And this is a book about *Die Malweiber*.
Right!
(person 1) Can you show that...
- Mm-hmm. Yup. - (person 1) ...[in writing]?
Questions?
(person 2) So, how did you initially find those women?
Because they are in a museum database, I guess.
How did they end up in the museum database?
[inaudible]
So, the museum has artworks by these artists,
so they basically got them in a storage facility somewhere,
and they have it in their collection system
saying this is this painting by this and this artist.
So they've got that data.
(person 2) Then you solve a notability problem, right?
It would if it was online, but it's not online.
This collection resource--
(person 3) [inaudible] been made public [inaudible].
Yeah, I can't--
(person 2) That's not needed,
like if you referenced a book, that's also good enough.
(person 3) You could reference an offline catalog.
Yeah, but again it's a question of, well, I don't even have an offline catalog.
I could maybe say it's the museum or whichever collection...
(person 2) I was going to say, I understand it's a small museum,
and maybe they don't have a very sophisticated--
Well, Stadtmuseum is not small, but, yeah. (chuckles)
(person 2) Maybe they don't have the resources
to really put up something sophisticated metadata-wise,
but you could literally have them publish even a press release.
Whatever mechanism they have of pushing data online that is by them,
that is by the state museum,
that can say, "Here is a list of women who were systematically excluded,
and yet, here is what we know about them.
And we say this as the state museum."
That is a source.
This was exactly the problem.
So, they did have this exhibition that's online,
but that's only 20 of, I think, 50 women artists.
(person 2) But they can say that about all of them.
That's why I think Wikidata also relaxed the rules a bit,
and let me keep that data in,
because I had it all up in the Wikidata import page.
But as I'm trying to say with Ida Maurer-Hahn,
I don't have any external reference,
and I hoped, though, just getting the GND IDs,
we'll have an opportunity to...
(person 2) I just wanted to mention, this is Andrew,
and his talk was about The Met,
the one I mentioned to you about this morning.
- So you two should talk. - Fantastic!
(person 2) Because he's also doing interesting things with museums,
So, I just wanted to make sure you connect.
And we should publish some of the artworks on Wikidata
to make the data more complete.
Well, I should also point out that some of the things we uploaded--
So, the Stadtmuseum is very focused at the moment
on the Humboldt Forum, which is being set up in Berlin.
Of these artworks that we digitized,
some of them have now run into rights issues,
some of them were taken offline again.
The moment we're digitizing this stuff,
half our work is really dealing with legal issues
and trying to explain to the institutions.
Because even if an artwork is in the public domain,
when it's being digitized or photographed,
certain rights are then ascribed to the person.
(person 2) But to be on Wikidata,
it doesn't have to be in the public domain.
No, but it has to have a fairly unrestricted license.
Not on Wikidata, sorry, but if I'm talking about the actual image.
- Sorry, I thought you meant the image. - (person 2) I was talking about Wikidata.
The metadata itself, that's all been put online. CC0, no problem.
(person 4) Hi! Your sources don't have to be online.
So, if they have a printed catalog,
whether it's an exhibition catalog, or a catalog of a whole collection,
you can create an item about that publication
and then use a *stated in* property
to cite that.
That's the problem. Not all the artists are in the catalog.
They do have a catalog,
but it's only 20 of 50, I think, women artists.
That's the whole issue.
They selected out of their whole collection of artists,
they only selected 20 of those artists.
So, there's still no written record of them anyway.
Like I said, I mean, hopefully, if within the next few weeks
I can get the GND IDs of the 19 missing artists, then...
(person 4) And further than that,
if you can state that a painting is in a collection,
and an artist is the creator of that painting,
or indeed the subject of the self-portrait painting,
then I think that satisfies the requirements
for inclusion in Wikidata.
It seems to so far. No one has deleted them yet.
Because that was that problem too.
The reason why those things got deleted
is there was a gap of a few months between when the artists were uploaded
and when I could complete uploading the paintings.
But, yeah, since all the paintings have been linked now too.
But I don't have any of those like Ida Maurer-Hahn.
They're just statements at the moment but without any references.
Hopefully, that will change soon.
(person 5) Hi. Thank you for your talk.
I have a question concerning the GLAM institution you mentioned.
What do you think are their learnings on this project,
because [inaudible] also have a lot of GLAM work,
and then for me it's interesting to see what the institution is thinking
about a collaboration with Wikidata for future work.
I mean, you sound a bit disappointed.
This is exactly the part where I need...
I need to be able to show them what they can do with the data online,
because at the moment it's a battle for us
even just to get them to deliver structured metadata.
So we work a lot with LIDO.
That will be passed on to the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.
It's a huge battle to get any data into LIDO, for a start,
and then we upload it to the DDB, which has its own issues.
Then with Wikidata, I've sort of tried to show--
We actually had Jason Evans two years ago give a presentation to say,
"This is what you can do. This is what we've done in Wales."
But every city has got its own speed and tempo.
Hopefully, out of this Stadtmuseum with their data,
we can start doing some interesting things,
find some applications and other institutions
that can maybe upload their data.
But at the moment, the museums, the GLAMs--
it's just not on their radar,
because they're so occupied with fundamental existential issues
that, you know, linked data is for them like,
"What the hell are you wasting my time with that for?
I'm going to make sure I can pay my employees,
of which there's only one, for next year."
But we try.
That's our role as we see it too.
This whole funding program is supposed to kind of...
I mean, the other major thing is long-term digital preservation.
We said, "Look, you can digitize this stuff,
but having it on a hard drive is not good.
You've got to have it into a proper system,
where, in 100 years, someone can actually access this resource."
(person 5) I feel your pain about the relevance
because I ran into a lot of these same issues of the Wikipedia,
especially the German language Wikipedia has these really strong relevance criteria
that are absolutely observed
and tend to exclude a lot of important information.
Would it help to change the relevance criteria?
Would that at all be possible?
Because I'm afraid, of course, that people will be afraid
that then "unnotable"-- whatever that means-- things
would manage to get in.
Well, this is it, I mean...
(sighs)
I think the moment someone makes an effort to upload something,
it becomes notable to a degree,
and I think the criteria at this stage, though, are actually quite flexible,
but I do think you run into that issue of there are notability criteria...
There is a process that has been put in place,
but it still depends on what an admin does.
At that time, when I got in touch with that admin,
he or she had deleted 150,000 different items.
So, there is a certain degree of arbitrariness in the whole process,
because at least I could convince him to put it back on,
but I know from the Wikidata mailing list
there's quite a few people who ran into the same issue
where stuff has been deleted.
So, I think the solution is to go the route, as I understand,
that Wikidata is proposing to of Wikibase installations.
They're making it a lot easier.
The Wikibase Docker is a lot easier to install.
I tried to install it about a year ago and struggled,
and I managed to get an instance up and running
and actually usable very easily with the Docker container.
And I think that's the way to go.
If you can get the institutions to see how easy it is to set it up.
15 years ago, they didn't have websites. Now they have websites.
And I would hope for Berlin, at least,
that we can maybe get a Wikibase instance going
and get a few museums to upload their curated data,
and then see how we can feed that into Wikidata.
And then I think everyone's happy, I would hope, but yeah...
(person 6) I'm going to ask a question you're unlikely to be able to answer.
But I'm going to ask it anyway.
I'm curious about the women whose artworks haven't been collected
by the institutions
because it sounds to me
like there's a large group of women artists,
some of whom won't have had their paintings collected
and don't appear to be in the record anywhere.
As a result, is there any movement or any research being undertaken,
or anything you're aware of to try and find these women
and get them into the record?
It’s like an extra step.
No, I think, this is the thing.
We can only start with the museums what they've got, basically.
The Stadtmuseum gets a lot of donations, as well from people around,
and then if maybe something turns up, they go,
"Well, we don't know who this artist is, and we can try to [track it back]."
That's the only serendipitous way it's going to happen.
But I think Berlin and Germany with its history
has lost so much artwork through bombing and destruction, whatever, too,
that I think there's a lot that has been lost permanently.
(person 5) Okay. Thank you.
(person 6) There's a group--
I can't remember the name for the life of me.
but they actually do a lot of work with Italian artists.
There's also work done in the UK
to kind of bring back women artists back to the front.
And so, I think all these local initiatives
might need to start working together
to do something global, to push more for it.
Maybe that would do something more.
(person 7) I wanted to inquire if there's a right direction to go
to animate institutions
to take part in making their data linked,
or open, in some kind of way available.
Should there be other institutions approaching--
Jealousy, it has to be jealousy.
That's the only way you're going to do it.
(person 7) I see. (chuckles)
You need to get one institution leading the way and people saying,
"Wow! Look what they can do with their data! We want that too!"
I think that's the way web servers got going really,
and I think that's the only way linked data is going to work
is to make them jealous.
(person 7) So, you think that the institutions
that are not having this great linked data Wikibase instance stuff
are going to say, "Yeah, we need that!"
and then are trying to find some people that can set it up for them.
Or should they approach other institutions that can help them with it?
Or which is the right direction for them to go?
For a starter, you've got to realize that data is a process.
It's never finished.
It's always something you’re working on,
and we would encourage any institution to take the first step,
but only to get cooperation.
So the Stadtmuseum Berlin has helped a lot of smaller museums
because then they say, "Look, we've got this stuff,
we need to do something with it."
And then they'll share it with the Stadtmuseum, so to speak,
and help it get online.
But we really have institutions
where there's just two working on it in there, part-time.
It's going to take a while before they get on that trajectory,
but I would hope that as the processes become better,
as Wikibase gets easier to use,
and as people get to see what the advantages are of it.
But I really think it's a process
that you're always going to have to support,
and it's something you're always going to have to make clear
to the funding institutions,
that it's not something they can just throw some money at, and then it's done.
It's going to need permanent funding. Libraries need permanent funding.
Anything to do with digital resources also need permanent funding, I think.
(moderator) Sorry, I think we have just run out of time for questions.
I encourage you to keep talking after the session,
and thank you so much to our speaker and all the attendees.
Thank you.
(applause)