Report from Wikimania

Last month I had to privilege to attend the Wikimania conference in Montreal, Canada, where 900 people from around the world gathered for two days of hacking and building and then three days of conference sessions. The conference scope includes not just the Wikimedia projects but also the big themes of open education, open access, community building, and privacy and rights in the digital age. One blog post by one attendee is only going to capture a sliver of what went on, and here I am summarising some big projects of most relevance to university research projects and GLAMs.

This time round, Wikidata rather than Wikipedia was generating the most excitement. Wikidata, the free structured knowledge-base, is going through a period of explosive growth, helped in a small part by data shared from partner institutions including Oxford University, and the conference brought together many people using Wikidata to document cultural heritage and current knowledge.

The author and hundreds of other Wikimedians. Photo by Victor Grigas of the Wikimedia foundation, CC-BY-SA 4.0

Continue reading

Data Carpentry Workshop for Humanists

You are invited to join a free Data Carpentry workshop run by the Reproducible Research Oxford project. Registration is required.

 

Date: 26–27 September 2017 

Venue: Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, 64 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN

 

The workshop will cover data organization in spreadsheets and OpenRefine, data analysis and visualization in python, and SQL for data management, with a focus on humanities data. This is a joint effort with Data Carpentry to develop a (pilot) curriculum for the digital humanities. It is at an introductory level.

See the workshop website for details: https://rroxford.github.io/2017-09-26-oxford/

The workshop is free and open to any member of the University — researchers, staff, and students. It will be particularly relevant to people working with humanities data, though the methods are widely applicable.