Database

With help of their prof, U of T students go from being Wikidata novices to international conference presenters

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 14:31:32 +0000

With help of their prof, U of T students go from being Wikidata novices to international conference presenters

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/02/2021 - 10:31

Cutline

A member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Stacy Allison-Cassin, an assistant professor, teaching stream, in the Faculty of Information, is interested in using Wikidata to document of Indigenous matters and further equity.

Ann Brocklehurst

Topic

Our Community

Database

Faculty of Information

Graduate Students

Indigenous

When Stacy Allison-Cassin began teaching students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information how to understand the tools, techniques and practices of documenting cultural records, she quickly identified Wikidata as an ideal platform.

While not as well known as Wikipedia, Wikidata is a database of knowledge – as opposed to an online encyclopedia – that can be edited by anyone. It is also more flexible and less complex than other formal library platforms, according to Allison-Cassin, an assistant professor, teaching stream, and a Wikidata user herself.

Cora Coady, one of Allison-Cassin’s students, says she preferred working in Wikidata to Wikipedia, where articles can be deleted or rejected. For example, Coady says she was unable to get a Wikipedia moderator to accept that Jacey Firth-Hagen, a promoter of Inuktitut language revitalization who is featured in the Canadian Encyclopedia, should have her own Wikipedia entry.

“With Wikidata, you don’t usually get flagged for that sort of thing,” Coady says. “Once you finish doing it, it’s published.”

Wikidata works by creating what’s known as structured data with data elements that are given a machine-readable semantic meaning. This semantically structured data enables more powerful machine processing and querying, which ultimately aids in findability and visibility on the internet.

Wikidata also allows for the linking of items to other data stores. For example, a researcher item in Wikidata can be linked to the same researcher item in the Virtual International Authority File with a “same as” connection. Because Wikidata is very large and openly available, it is playing an increasingly powerful role within the linked data cloud.

While “going from zero to Wikidata” can be a bit of a challenge, Allison-Cassin says at least three of her master of information students’ Wikidata projects were so impressive by the end of her course – titled “Representing, Documenting and Accessing the Cultural Record” (INF1321H) – that she invited them to present at the LD4 Conference on Linked Data last summer.

At the conference, Coady spoke about documenting the IM4 Lab, an Indigenous matriarchs’ lab in British Columbia that supports Indigenous artists and media professionals who use of augmented and virtual reality; Julia Gilmore described how she had documented Toronto’s public swimming culture; and Adam Cavanaugh discussed how and why he narrowed his project from documenting biodiversity in Toronto’s High Park to focusing on the park’s Black Oak Savannah as a specific ecosystem.

Coady says her research on the IM4 Lab revealed most existing documentation had been generated by the matriarchs themselves.

“I found it disconcerting,” she says, noting that the women had made TV shows and films as we well as writing books. “Often people don’t consider that Indigenous media is for everybody – not just Indigenous Peoples. They’re losing out if they don’t see it as having value for everyone.”

As part of her project, Coady, a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, created Wikidata items for three of the four matriarchs – Doreen Manuel, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Tracey Kim Bonneau – and enhanced existing documentation for the fourth, Loretta Todd. She also discovered and documented the lab’s newly launched “Immersive Knowledge Transfer” podcast.

Shaped by the needs and interests of its community of users, Wikidata has thousands of items for books, films and people, as well as extensive user discussion on how to document them.

However, Gilmore says she found far less information about buildings and even less about swimming pools. Such a lack of documentation can make creating an item and deciding on which properties it should have a more complex process than for a more well-defined area such books.

A further complication is what are known as “data dependencies.” For example, Gilmore says, if she wanted to say a swimming pool was named after a person, that person would also need to exist as an item in Wikidata. If they weren’t already in Wikidata, she would have to create that item as well. Since she wanted to connect two of her favorite pieces of writing about swimming – Swimming Studies, a memoir by Leanne Shapton and The Swimming Pool Library, an essay by Naomi Skwarna – to the pools she intended to catalogue, Gilmore decided to follow the model of a Wiki member who had used the “narrative location” property to create a map of places in Copenhagen featured in different books.

“I really liked this suggestion as it helped to bring the experience of swimming in these pools to the surface and situated the pools within a larger cultural framework,” she explained in her conference presentation.

Cavanaugh, who wanted to represent High Park’s land through themes of biodiversity, was wary of classifying land based on municipal standards, categories and co-ordinates. He eventually decided the best way to proceed with his project would be documenting High Park’s Black Oak Savannah visually through photos he took and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

As he did this, he found himself encountering and dealing with many of the issues raised in the readings for the course, including how Canadian colonial settlement can affect the cultural record and why there are tensions between the ethos of open access and traditional knowledge systems.

For example, Cavanaugh was puzzled by why he kept encountering two spellings of the word “savannah” – one with an “H” and one without. Researching the etymology of the word revealed that it came from the Spanish word “sabana” and that its use can be traced back to the 16th century when Spanish colonizers took the Taino Indigenous people’s word “zabana,” meaning treeless plain, and applied it to a transitional grassland ecosystem found in other colonial contexts such as Africa.

Cavanaugh wondered if by using the dominant classifying schemes for his Wikidata entries he “might be seen as capitulating to the process of cultural linguistic absorption.”

All three of the students agree that the act of cataloguing using Wikidata had demonstrated that it is a subjective experience. At the same time, they also saw a great potential to re-imagine how cultural records are described and documented.

As an Indigenous student, Coady says she and others often feel the responsibility to discuss important ongoing issues such as residential schools and the disproportionate number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Such work is “difficult and exhausting, and the result is an overwhelming journalistic and scholarly landscape of trauma,” she told the conference. “Perhaps we should also feel the same need to build documentation that recognizes people’s accomplishments and successes.

“Indigenous people deserve visibility and our children deserve to know that there are and have been great Indigenous role models.”

Allison-Cassin, a member of of the Métis Nation of Ontario, agrees that Wikidata is a useful tool to document Indigenous matters and is interested in using the platform to further equity.

“Working on Wikimedia projects is a way for me to make my community visible and call attention to areas where inequity is present,” says Allison-Cassin, who chairs the Indigenous matters section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. “I am now involved with many international groups with a more activist bent.”

This massive, open-access database will answer your questions about human cultures

lanthierj — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 18:01:09 +0000

This massive, open-access database will answer your questions about human cultures

lanthierj Wed, 07/27/2016 - 14:01

Peter Boisseau

Author legacy

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research

Database

Wondering if monogamy was more popular than polygamy in the 19th and 20th centuries? Curious to know which societies are linked to a common ancestor on a language tree? A University of Toronto researcher and her colleagues have “D-PLACE” for you.

An open-access database, D-PLACE pulls together a searchable mass of information on the languages, cultures, locations and environments of more than 1,400 largely pre-industrial societies, as documented by ethnographers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Anyone can use it for free, it has an easy-to-use interface, and it provides a quick view of how diverse humans really are,” says Kathryn Kirby, a postdoctoral fellow with U of T’s departments of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) and geography.

Visit D-PLACE

Kirby was the lead author of a study by an international team of researchers that established the d-place.org website. Their paper was published this month in PLOS ONE.

Visitors to the site can choose to display the results of their search in a table, map or a linguistic tree diagram, and even download the results for further analysis.

“For instance, you could ask which societies in the world are monogamous versus polygamous, and this would give you a global snapshot of what that pattern looked like between the 1800s and 1950s,” says Kirby.

“To be able to look at the marriage systems for all those societies at a glance is pretty cool.”

D-PLACE shows family relationships, dependence on fishing, hunting and agriculture

By the same token, a website user could easily determine the pattern of so-called “nuclear” versus extended-family relationships for the same period, or explore societies’ relative dependence on fishing, hunting, and agriculture for subsistence.

The database largely depends on two previously published collections of cross-cultural data. Kirby and the other researchers tagged all the data available with specifics about the time and place where the cultural data was collected, then added information about the environmental conditions and ecosystems where each of the societies was located.

They also took advantage of new methods in linguistics to plot the history of those societies based on language, allowing users to see when societies diverged from a common ancestor.

“The cultural data is based on data points from 1800s and 1900s, but there are relationships that are represented in these linguistic trees that go back 10,000 years in some cases,” says Kirby.

“There are about 7,000 languages in the world, and we’ve got a snapshot of about 1,300 in the database, so there is this incredible diversity, and we’ve only scratched the surface of it.”

In the near future, D-PLACE will be updated to make its information more expansive, says Kirby, but the database is already a major step forward among the research tools available to scientists and academics.

Enabling a new generation to tackle questions about the forces shaping cultural diversity

While it’s easy for the public to use, it also maintains the original authors’ codes and ethnographic references for more sophisticated research. By doing so, D-PLACE may enable a new generation of scholars to tackle long-standing questions about the forces that have shaped the history of cultural diversity.

By combining linguistic, anthropological and ecological data, it also serves as an example of the type of interdisciplinary research that an increasing number of educators and academics say is the best approach for modern scholars.

“All the things you need to run a vigorous analysis of the drivers of cultural change are all in one place on this website,” says Kirby.

“And from a public perspective, it is just pretty neat to be able to see the relationships that are out there, because while the world is fabulously diverse in terms of cultural practices, basically, we’re all related.”