Bridging Media Art History and Open Knowledge Learning Journal

About this Page

This page creates a space for the making and sharing of a learning journal connected to the work of Andrew Gryf Paterson (User:Agryfp) with AvoinGLAM from June 2024 onwards.

There is a guiding question in the process of learning: How can artists, curators, cultural producers with smaller cultural organizations connect to larger ecosystems of open heritage knowledge?

The ambition of the work has 3 aspects:

1. To familiarize with tools/platforms WikiData, WikiBase, OpenRefine towards their use with smaller cultural organisation event data.
2. To organise an Expert meeting 16-17 October 2024 towards sharing experience with artist or curator-led media art archiving with open knowledge ecosystems, including Li-MA (Amsterdam) and AvoinGLAM's engagement with the Finnish Media Art History (MEHI) project.
3. To develop plans for pedagogy or training for artists or small cultural organisations in Finland and elsewhere.

The Journal of process is elaborated below.

Personal background context

The question of how artists, curators and cultural producers with small cultural organizations may connect to larger ecosystems of open knowledge and heritage has been a significant basis of of my (Agryfp) person practice-based research and cultural work for over 12 years. However, it has mostly taken place within the context of small hybrid arts, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cultural associations in Finland, and on occasions with collaborators in Latvia. One of the main contexts for the development and presentation of those activities were Pixelache Helsinki Festival, Finnish Bioart Society or RIXC Art+Communications/Art+Science Festival in Rīga.

Such projects explored participatory platforms for gathering media or knowledge, and inspired by Wiki-hackathon or Wiki-sprint model into other communication formats, such as Book sprint, but rarely contributed to Wikimedia platform.

It is clear that while open culture, open knowledge and participatory platforms have been important influences in the mid to late 2000s and early 2010s, there has not been much exchange or collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation activities.

This learning journal aims to explore the overlaps the work that have takn place in the Finnish and International media art cultural scene.

Pixelache Wikimedians-in-Residence

In 2021, during the produciton planning of Pixelache Helsinki Festival that year, and with consideration of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the festival, Wikimedian User:Zblace approached Pixelache with the proposal to introduce a discussion event of how media arts and smaller cultural organizations may get involved in Wikimedia work, using the Wikimedian-in-residence model. A successful application was made to Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Grant support enabling the Wikimedians-in-Residence at Pixelache project to produce a series of podcasts which would reflect upon how to engage or re-engage with the Wikimedia Community from 2022 onwards.

Media Art History in Finland (MEHI)

Around the same time the Finnish Media Art Organisation Network started a larger Media Art History in Finland (MEHI) project (2021-2024) to produce an ontology for media arts and artworks (in Finnish, Swedish and English), a database of media artists and artworks that aligned with Finnish National Gallery Collection & archive standard format, conservation plan examples for media artworks, a historical art timeline and anthology of edited and selected narratives or perspectives from Finland-based experts in the field.

The project aimed to document and publish the history of Finnish media art and build robust information infrastructures for its documentation using Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for open sharing. A key objective was to ensure the continued growth of media art knowledge on Wikidata by encouraging contributions from artists and cultural organizations.

This learning journal aims to augment the Media_Art_History project started by AvoinGLAM.

Step 1: Learning about Media Art in Finland (MEHI) Project

The MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project was financed by AVEK, Kone Foundation, The Ministry of Education and Culture, Oskar Öflund Foundation, The Finnish Cultural Foundation and The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

Several aspects of the MEHI project seems to be relevent to developing AvoinGLAM engagement with the MEHI project:

• Ontology, via Mira Rissanen (information specialist) & Minna Tarkka (m-cult director, 1960-2023)
• Conservation, via Anniina Hatakka (conservationist)
• Database, via Sandra Lindblom (information specialist)
• General production, via Tuuli Penttinen-Lampisuo (MEHI project producer)

• Timeline (developed in conjunction with Anthology)

Online meetings were arranged in June with all of the above except regarding Ontology.

Ontology

"OMA, Ontology for Media Art published in June 2022 at the Finto.fi vocabulary service maintained by the National Library of Finland. With over 1500 concepts to describe the wide field of media arts, ranging from video, sound, light art, experimental film and music to new forms of digital literature and AI based art, OMA is one of the most comprehensive terminology resources dedicated to media art. Concepts from the tri-lingual (fi,sv,en) ontology have also been added and linked to Wikidata.

Media Culture Association M-cult with the information specialist Mira Rissanen and the executive director Minna Tarkka were responsible for realizing the OMA – Ontology for Media Art. In the wikidata migration they were consulted by the open data specialist Susanna Ånäs User:Susannaanas, and in the ontology publishing their main partner was the National Library’s Finto.fi service."

The development of the Ontology for Media Arts [developed from 2021 andpublished in June 2022] is an important development for AvoinGLAM Media Art History project as it integrated an international thesaurus of media arts, with the General Finnish Ontology YSO, and also sought out comparisons already entered in Wikidata. This gives a foundation for further entries into open data ecosystems.

For example, 'Hacker culture' entry in OMA, closely matches Wikidata item 'hacker culture' (Q3083944).

This can be helpful in cross-referencing terms in Finnish & Swedish with English equivalent, looking up item in Wikidata, and extending language labels/descriptions.

Conservation

"The connection between media art and evolving technology is problematic for the long-term preservation of art. Even new art pieces may become endangered at a rapid pace. MEHI – Media Art History in Finland project charted and piloted the conservation of media art through key artworks, whose conservation plans were made public for future use in exhibiting and preserving art.

The conservation plans were made in cooperation with artists, collection organizations, Nordic partners and the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. The goal was to share knowledge for public use and to further develop the professional standards, education, research and collection work of media arts..

The objective of the MEHI project was to create conservation plans for ten diverse works of Finnish media art from different decades.The conservator charted out the history, context, intended meaning and condition of the selected piece, and then create a conservation plan based on the acquired information. The selected artworks were named by the consulting experts of MEHI. Conservation can not proceed without a conservation plan."

The Conservation example plan in MEHI project eventually included 7 different media art works that exemplified different types of media art works, and followed new work by Anniina Hatakka in adapting conservation considerations for museums with guidelines by CSC (Finland, https://csc.fi/) for the long term preservation of digital heritage. The 3 seperation model of conservation was augmented with 4th section in a form that could be filled by artists, curators etc:

1. Basic info about the artwork meta-data: name of work, type of work, period in time, artist(s), owner(s), where it has been exhibited, publications or where it has been written about work, description of the work, artist's view of the work
2. Structural information about artwork: What are the work's components e.g. hardware, what has been added or removed during it's installation
3. Details of the technical aspects: Duration, software used, code, presentation and installation requirements
4. Added 4th section: Storage and conservation considerations: handling instructions, storage contitions, assessment of re-install ability,

Info from artist helped refine the form and categories. The perspective of artist also helped explain the context of the work, where it was presented, what that may have meant at the time. This hints at the value of considering the social or community context of the work.

Conceptual art & performance arts were considered in the form. Documentation was noted as being is crucial in the conservation.

Database

The MEHI Database "cataloged reference information on 1000 media art works and 1,594 artists, authors and communities. The trilingual database will be available in Finnish, Swedish and English. Technical details related to the storage and publication of the reference database are currently being finalized for publication in early 2024..

"The database is created as a collaboration between 20 media art organizations, festivals, production companies, and information scientist Sandra Lindblom working for the MEHI project.

The MEHI Project’s aim was to create a set that represents the diversity of media art in terms of content, aesthetics and technology, as well as the phases and characteristics of Finnish media art. Consistency and systematicity are the key factors of quality data collection. To support the data collection, a common, updated and detailed cataloging guide was created. The guide can be read as a Google Docs file, and questions and comments can be added to it."[1]

English translation of MEHI artwork categories (translated by Sandra Lindblom):

• The name of the work
• Language of artwork title (fi, sv, en or blank)
• The type of name (e.g. work name)
• Text related to details about the creation of the artwork.
• The first translation of the title of the work.
• The type of the name of the first translation (e.g. work name translation)
• Language of the 1st translation
• Second translation of the title of the work.
• The type of the name of the second translation.
• Language of the 2nd translation
• Timing or Time Start Year.
• Time end Year.
• Precision about the timing.
• Object type (e.g. artwork)
• Descriptive text of the work in Finnish (500 chars)
• Descriptive text of the work in English (500 chars)
• Descriptive text of the work in Swedish (500 chars)
• Keywords describing the content of the artwork
• Words related to forms of art or genres relevant to the work. (relates to Ontology for Media Arts)
• Duration: hours
• Duration: minutes
• Duration: seconds
• The duration of the work expressed verbally.
• Dimension type, aspect ratio, or size.
• Text field for recording aspect ratio or textual information about size of the work.
• Type of size data to be expressed numerically: 2D or 3D.
• 2D or 3D dimensions of the work in writing.
• Keywords related to the technique-
• Keywords related to material
• The 'collection' to which the work belongs.
• Places with copies of the work.
• Filename of the work image.
• Contact information for a person who can be asked for a picture of the work and related rights.
• Image license
• An event related to the work, also catalogued in the MEHI database.

English translation of MEHI categories for linking artwork with artist in database (translated by Sandra Lindblom):

• Name of the artwork in the MEHI database
• The name of the person and/or organization related to the artwork. Names of persons are written in the form First name Surname.
• The role of the person/organization related to the work, e.g., artist, performer, programmer. The role is selected from a list of options. If the role that the person has in the work cannot be found in the list, the person's information can be mentioned in the field that's ment for additional information about the production of the work.

English translation of MEHI categories for persons and communities in database (translated by Sandra Lindblom):

• Surname of the person, if the type person is selected
• First other name of the person or community
• Type of first other name. The type of other name is selected from the drop-down menu. Chose one of these namnes: married name (Finnish: avionimi), English name (Finnish: englanninkielinen nimi), former name (Finnish: entinen nimi), first name (Finnish: etunimi), full name (koko nimi), nickname (kutsumanimi), other name (muu nimi), later name (myöhempi nimi), pen name/user name (Finnish: nimimerkki), current name (nykyinen nimi), pseudonym (pseudonyymi), née (omaa sukua), parallel name (rinnakaisnimi), Swedish name (ruotsinkielinen nimi), surname (sukunimi), birth name (syntymänimi), artist name (taiteilijanimi), name in a foreign language (vieraskielinen nimi), official name (virallinen nimi)
• Second other name of the person or community
• Type of first other name. The type of other name is selected from the drop-down menu.
• Year of birth of the person or year when the community was established.
• Year of death (if a person is deceased) or year when activities of a community ceased
• List of people closely related to the community, such as members of an artist group. Additionally catalogue each person you mention here on their own rows in this table, if the persons haven't been catalogued yet. A link between the records of the persons and the records of the community is later created.
• The roles of persons closely associated with the community (member, founder) in relation to the community in the same order as mentioned on the left. For artist groups, the role of a member is used. The role of a person closely associated with the production company is the founder.
• The roles of persons closely associated with the community (member, founder) in relation to the community in the same order as mentioned on the left. For artist groups, the role of a member is used. The role of a person closely associated with the production company is the founder.
• Type of identifier. Here, ISNI, or Business ID can be selected as the identifier type. Also KANTO identifiers are added to the MEHI database, but this is done through the Finto API. The field is left blank if the actor does not have an identifier.
• Identifier, for example XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX or XXXXXXX-X

See Guideline / Cataloguing instructions (in Finnish)

-

Note: At time of writing July 2024, the materials are now being handled by the Finnish National Gallery archival team, and copyright on translations and textual descriptions are being processed. According to MEHI producer Tuuli Penttinen-Lampisuo it is unlikely that the database will be extendable in conjunction with the National Gallery for the forseeable future.

--

Experience of including Pixelache Helsinki Festival as part of MEHI database

The combination of both these processes experienced by myself (Agryfp) with Wikimedians-in-residence at Pixelache, and engagement of Pixelache in MEHI project, encouraged me to explore and learn further about how small media arts organizations can be involved in preparing data for engagement with larger memory and heritage systems, such as museum and national archives, but also to do so using open ecosystems, as led by AvoinGLAM. The MEHI project focused on artists and artworks, which was influenced by the Museum collection model.

Media arts is a smaller genre of contemporary and emerging arts practice, and does not always produce just artworks or installations that are presented in any given festival. Festivals such as Pixelache festival can include formats such as installations, workshops, presentation events, gatherings, performances, social events, club nights, symposiums, seminars.

As a long-standing member of Pixelache Festival association together with the photographer-documentor Antti Ahonen who are interested in archiving, we attended related workshop to contributing to MEHI project objectives, however in our experience it was challenging to identify artworks without association agreement about what to curate and hightlight into the database from the 100s of contributors over 20 years.

Contribution was complicated by:

• Presenting over 20 years emerging practices that may not be considered artworks or being made by professional artists. Note that this started to change from 2015 festival onwards with re-establishment of rotating artistic directors who came from different backgrounds.
• Event based activities such as workshops, performances or demos did not necessarily produce artworks that fitted gallery or museum system of database
• Not having regular positions in directorship, curators or coordinator over the past decade+ (2011-2023) meant that there was not clear decision-making group
• Earliest generations of active contributors had since moved on to other places and positions beyond Pixelache.

Eventually the 22 Pixelache Festivals that had taken place between 2002-2021 were included as an individual entry for each festival in the MEHI event database. This work was started by Antti Ahonen & myself (Agryfp), but the majority of the work was completed by informationist Sandra Lindblom.

Other than a few token examples, the content of the festivals was mostly excluded to due to the amount of participants (some identifying as artists and others not), and the number of events withing each 3-8 day festival event over 20 years.

Post-MEHI work integrating into WikiData & Wikimedia

As the MEHI project elements was mostly completed in 2023, Susanna Ånäs transferred the artists and artworks compiled in the database into WikiData entries as lists of [[2]] and Artworks.

This work also contributes to the WikiData WikiProject Media Art.

Considering the 'closed' status of the MEHI project, in which the production group is winding down and reporting activities, it is the open knowledge and Wikimedia aspects of the project which offer the most hope for it's continuation or extension.

The following steps will look into approaches towards this aim.

Step 2: Learning about Wikidata

The most obvious place to start learning about Wikidata is from their own dedicated website & introduction: "Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary knowledge base, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and to anyone in the world."

There are also simple starting exercises via the Wikidata Tours initiative.

This step involved gathering useful references and video presentations, starting with early history of it's development, and taking selective notes:

Asaf Bartov: Wiki + data = Wikidata (and why you should care), NDF - National Digital Forum, November 2019. YouTube.com

"Structured data: Every piece of information is described as a 'triple' - Subject, predicate, object, or 'Item, property, value'

Data statements link to each other, enabling discovery and reasoning.

Uses: 1. Describe data with flexible level of detail or abstraction 2. Centralize data and avoid duplication of effort 3. Avoid multiple copies falling out of sync 4. Connect disparate IDs and align datasets 5. Serve as discovery platform for data elsewhere 6. Massively multilingual aligned vocabularies 7. Lateral querying across arbitrary vectors - you can ask it interesting questions"

The History of Wikidata by Denny Vrandečić. YouTube.com

"A free knowledge graph anyone can edit"

The data model of Wikidata Knowledge-Based Systems, TU Dresden. YouTube.com

"Property types (as of 2020): - Entities of a fixed type (item, property,lexeme, sense, form) - Quantities (including integers and numbers with units) - Points in time (including imprecise dates and times in the distant past/future) - Geographic coordinates (possibly on on other stronomic bodies) and shapes - URLs - Strings and special strings (external identifier, media file name on Wikimedia Commons, tabular data file name on Wikimedia Commons, mathematical formula, musical notation) - Texts in a specific language"

Step 3: Learning about how Wikidata has been applied to Cultural event data

Media Artists and Artworks in MEHI project database have been already included as Wikidata items, and Cultural events (which give context to how or when those artists' and their works were presented) are not, it seems important to seek out a better understanding of how Wikidata has been applied to Cultural events, such as festivals, exhibitions, workshop or other social gatherings.

Several WikiProjects were found (with English language searches) towards making data models for including such events, and larger projects focused on compiling open linked data for the cultural sector:

• WikiProject Cultural Events
• WikiProject Performing arts
• WikiProject: Cultural Venues (Australia)

There is also the example of The Open Database of Cultural and Art Facilities (Canada), which was developed by several Canada-based communities of practice, the Linked Open Data Ecosystem for the Performing Arts, and Performing Arts Information Representation Community Group. They have produced a very useful guide and learning resources to adding cultural venues to wikidata.

It is noted that there are also several Wikidata items which are specifically referencing media or digitial art festivals:

• Digital Art Festival (Q126682939)
• New Media Art Festival (Q126682969)

Which build upon another more general items such as

• cultural event (Q58687420) which is a sub-class of Event (Q1656682)

'Properties for this type' related to an Event in Wikidata:

• sponsor
• organizer
• participant
• number of participants
• date of official opening
• point in time
• duration
• event interval
• field of work
• location
• country
• start time
• end time
• main subject
• officially opened by
• speaker
• part of the series

Comment: The above categories start to get close to the many of details that help describe a festival. However, any participants would need to be added/entered into WikiData if they are to be included also.

.

There are also already 2 specific items related to Pixelache Festival, entered by User:Zblace:

• Pixelache (Q18694056) (Festival in general, rather than a particular edition in series)
• Wikimedians-in-residence at Pixelache (example of project)

Step 4: Learning about OpenRefine

OpenRefine is an open source software that assists in working with and processing messy data, and integrating into external databases, such as WikiData.

There is a dedicated introduction manual for to how the tool can be used for integrating data to Wikibase, Wikidata and WikiMedia Commons.

It has been introduced to me via Susanna Ånäs as it has been used in the OpenGLAM scene internationally to bulk process cultural data into Wikidata items.

It is possible to import the following formats: TSV, CSV, *SV, Excel (.xls and .xlsx), JSON, XML, RDF as XML, and Google Data documents are all supported. Support for other formats can be added with OpenRefine extensions.

Working with OpenRefine & MEHI data

Notes on imagined process

1. Identify/design a data model for a cultural festival event

2. Find a way to make that into a Schema in OpenRefine

3. Adjust & reconcile the data from MEHI into Wikidata format

4. Reconciliation