2022-02-23

• Some new faces
  • Stacy Olavide
    • Cartographic cataloger at PCL. Has been cataloging books during the past 2 years due to the lockdown.
    • Has get pretty interested in metadata work through the conversations around reparative metadata initiatives.
    • Understands linked data as an expansion upon cataloging work. Very fascinated about non-MARC cataloging and where things are going  with linked data projects.
  • Albert Palacios
    • Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Lillas Benson Latin American Collections. Took the wikidata course from the Seiler workshop series. Haven't had the change to get very deep into it yet.
    • Current grant project around creating models to transcribe Spanish Colonial era materials.
    • Expects to extract large loads of textual materials as data, and very interested in learning more about linked data.
  • Elliot Williams
    • DPLA metadata aggregation service coordinator for the TDL. Interested in thinking about different ways in which people create metadata and how to use linked data to connect different resources and collections across institutions.
  • Alyssa Guzman
    •  Digital Scholarship Librarian and the Diversity Resident Coordinator. Came to earlier meetings of the group. 

Katie  

• Paloma
  • Descriptive metadata related to resources on the Architecture Archives
  • Projects (2)
    • Creating Wikidata entries for people in the archives that don't have a wikidata item yet using the finding aids as reference source
    • GIS data set from one of the collections – reconciling names and places (building names) with wikidata and creating new missing items on wikidata – using a GIS specific database to explore the data
• Questions
  • Albert - Is the group sharing workflows on how to create and contribute to wikidata? 
    
    • Katie – they have very robust documentation of the workflows that they are happy to share. There have also been many opportunities to share about these projects and workflows within this group. Need to move 
  • Albert - I wonder if that could be transformed into a general workflow guide for faculty and students to use for thrown work
  • Alyssa – If interested in sharing documentation with faculty and students, then they can be added to the digital humanities libGuide (https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/sb.php?subject_id=115239). There is also a scholarship LibGuides (https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/sb.php?subject_id=115239). If we were interested in creating a specific libGuide of linked data, then that is a larger project.

• Melanie - we are looking for ways to expand out the group of people that comes to these meetings, and looking for networking and potential collaboration opportunities on campus or locally. The Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship communities seem to be an potential ally for us. Any low hanging fruit that we could start with in terms of promoting this visibility and get the networking started? Do you see potential in hosting Wikidata edit-a-thons?
  • Alyssa
    • Any announcements that you want to share with the campus DH community can be sent to the listserv digitalhumanities@utlists.utexas.edu. Anyone 
    • had a very well attended workshop on editing Wikipedia. A Wikidata workshop would probably be great. Would love to have us do something on the Fall series
    • Folks who have been doing wiki-edit-a-thons have had a lot of success. Gina Bastone (English Librarian) has been very involved on those. 
    • Another potential venue for partnership would be ADH. Brand new institute that is under the humanities institute, and they are also moving the Digital Studies certificate for under grads and grands under the umbrella of DH
  • Albert
    • The ADH just started formally this semester so they are still trying to figure out how to deploy some of the conversations that the task force are having in some of the programs that they have. They would be a great audience, for workshops, or even just doing lightning presentations on linked data. Good way of showcasing what we are doing
    • In his experience, all students and faculty he is working with is to get the transcriptions done right, so that then they can pull data from those transcriptions. The most they work with structured data is to create social network analysis or map visualizations, so there are a lot of CSVs that they end up putting on a data repository, but he does not have the expertise to transform that yet.
    • There is one faculty he is aware that have thought about linked data, but most of the students are not thinking or know much about it
    • There is also the issue with privacy. Most of the students are working with individuals that are still alive. There are privacy concerns. Also ethical concerns. Project of mapping communities to the collections, but if they were published in a platform like wikidata, then they would be exposing them to the authorities. But for the historical data, it is definitely something he is interested in exploring.

• We are all trying to find a balance. There is no capacity for any of us to became the linked data reference on campus, 1) because we are still learning also, 2) because we are doing many of this projects on the side, on top of our other responsibilities, and if we have to spend the little time we have for linked data answering reference questions, then we will have not time to work on the projects
• We could 
• What type of workshop we should think about? How should it be scoped? Is it a general intro to linked data? Or just wikidata
  • Probably we don't want to do a general linked data one. Start small with an edit-a-thon for campus cultural heritage staff (UT Libs, Briscoe, HRC, Blanton, etc...) and then follow up with some targeted presentation
• Edith-a-thon is a great idea. We can come up with a structured project and walk people through how to do the edits. There are also models that we can follow (e.g. Harvard).
• Opportunity for us to share our projects and also invite people to contribute
• Practical aspect of having projects ready to go when we have to deal with working from home again
• It would also be useful to have a follow up with another workshop about tools. Something that demonstrates why we want to put our stuff on wikidata. Showing the value
• Also showing how to use openrefine together with Wikidata. How to contribute through open refine, how to retrieve things from wikidata, etc...
• Summer seems like a good timing to attempt this.

• Draft on wiki
  • "Work to build institutional support needed to integrate linked data technologies into routine metadata workflows" goal might need some fleshed out. Would be good to have more clear deliverable
  • On the other hand, these are higher level goals. Is it too high level to be useful?
  • Some of them could be broken down in "how tos", is that something we want to work on? What level of structure do we want to have?
  • Maybe given our bandwidth, we could keep these goals more on the loose side and see how far we go
  • We have a good momentum, with our proposal for TDL, and then we can also start thinking about edit-a-thons and workshops for the fall
• Next meeting
  • Revisit short term goals and this discussion
  • Review suggestions and ideas from Alyssa and Albert
  • Continue looking at a potential workshop or edit-a-thon