Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Opera on the Nation's Stage--Digital Humanities Project (ID: 23608318)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Jgrimmer1222
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Opera on the Nation's Stage--Digital Humanities Project
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-03-01 - 2026-06-06
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
United States of America
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Not applicable
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
The change we want to bring is increased visibility and scholarly research on the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC) and on Mary Cardwell Dawson’s extraordinary labor in building and sustaining it. Although the NNOC was the first African American opera company in the United States and played a vital role in shaping operatic culture in Washington, D.C. and beyond, its history remains fragmented. Archival documentation exists in multiple places: most prominently at the Library of Congress, but also at the National Negro Opera House in Pittsburgh, which is currently under restoration, and in the personal papers of performers, donors, and collaborators scattered across many institutions. This dispersal makes it difficult for researchers and the public to grasp the company’s impact as a whole.
To address this, we will create a unified, openly accessible Wikidata-based knowledge graph of the NNOC that documents the people, performances, venues, and institutions connected to it. By linking these entities to archival constellations in Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), the graph will enable users to move seamlessly from open knowledge platforms to the archival sources that support research. Embedding the graph within the larger digital humanities project, Opera on the Nation’s Stage: A Narrative Bibliography of Politics and Performance in Washington, D.C., ensures that the NNOC’s story is not only preserved but also contextualized as part of the capital’s broader operatic history. In this way, the project connects and amplifies existing archival work, encouraging new research, teaching, and public engagement with this pivotal chapter in African American and American cultural history.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
We will begin by identifying and gathering data on the people, venues, institutions, and productions connected to the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC), drawing on our narrative bibliography research and the archival sources where NNOC-related materials are held. We will then create and enrich Wikidata items for these entities, adding well-cited statements and authority control (e.g., VIAF, ISNI, Library of Congress identifiers). A central priority is to link items to Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) so that users can move directly from Wikidata to the relevant archival constellations and finding aids.
We will use existing Wikidata modeling practices and properties appropriate to performing arts data (e.g., items for people, organizations, works, and performances; properties such as performer, location, point in time, and work performed). Our emphasis is on accurate data entry, consistent references, and quality control using Wikidata’s built-in tools and constraints.Once items are established, we will build the knowledge graph through SPARQL queries in the Wikidata Query Service. We will save and share the core queries publicly, generate an interactive view of NNOC relationships for exploration, and export a static relationship map (in the spirit of the “Madame X” example) for Commons and the project site. Where helpful, we will use Scholia to surface aggregated profiles based on the new data.
To ensure usability, we will hire an hourly graduate student to create a simple front-end interface and embed the knowledge graph within the digital humanities site, Opera on the Nation’s Stage: A Narrative Bibliography of Politics and Performance in Washington, D.C. The interface will present the graph alongside the project’s other components—two ArcGIS StoryMaps (operatic venues in the city; international influences) and a TimelineJS of American commissions by the Washington National Opera—so that scholarly and public audiences can explore the city’s operatic history in one place.
Finally, we will publish a concise SNAC–Wikidata linking guide and brief documentation of our editing workflow and saved queries on Meta and the project website, so that others can replicate or extend the approach for related performing-arts histories.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
The project is co-led by Jessica Grimmer, Co-Director of the Center for Archival Futures at the University of Maryland, and Christina Taylor Gibson, Performing Arts and Digital Humanities Librarian at Towson University. Together, we are co-authors of the forthcoming narrative bibliography and digital humanities project, Opera on the Nation’s Stage: Politics and Performance in Washington, D.C. Both bring extensive expertise in musicology, archival research, and digital humanities, and both will contribute as volunteers to Wikimedia. Our collaborative work ensures that the Wikidata knowledge graph of the National Negro Opera Company is embedded in and sustained by a larger program of scholarship and public engagement.
To support implementation, the project will hire an hourly graduate student to create the interface and embed the knowledge graph within the Opera on the Nation’s Stage digital humanities site. This role will focus on technical development, ensuring that the graph is both usable by the public and integrated effectively with the project’s other components.
The project will also be grounded in partnerships. We will seek input from Wikimedia communities, including WikiProject Opera, WikiProject African Diaspora, and Women in Red, to align with best practices for modeling cultural heritage data. We will also consult with archival partners, such as the Library of Congress Music Division, the Kennedy Center Archives, and the stewards of the National Negro Opera House in Pittsburgh, to confirm accurate linking of archival sources and authority records. These partnerships help ensure the project’s accuracy, transparency, and value to both Wikimedia and scholarly communities.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
The project will engage multiple communities at once. Within Wikimedia, it will contribute to and benefit from WikiProject Opera, WikiProject African Diaspora, Women in Red, and the wider Wikidata community interested in cultural heritage. In the scholarly world, it will serve musicologists, archivists, and historians working on African American culture and performing arts. Graduate students in information science and musicology will participate as Wikidata editors and gain valuable professional skills in linked data and digital humanities.
We will engage these participants before and during the project by consulting WikiProjects on our data modeling, sharing drafts on talk pages, and inviting feedback. Students will participate in Wikidata editing sessions and receive training in both editing practice and metadata modeling. After the project, we will publish a comprehensive documentation page on Meta and Commons, present our work at scholarly and Wikimedia forums, and encourage others to replicate our SNAC–Wikidata linking approach.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
This project has grown out of sustained conversations with colleagues in musicology, archival studies, and librarianship. We have presented aspects of our broader Opera in D.C. project and discussed it with peers at the Society for American Music, and at both the national and regional meetings of the Music Library Association (MLA). These conversations have helped us refine our approach and underscored the need for greater visibility and open access to materials related to the National Negro Opera Company.
The project has also been formally recognized by the Dena Epstein Award from the MLA, which is supporting our travel to archival repositories outside Washington, D.C. This recognition demonstrates the project’s significance within the scholarly community and its potential to broaden research access. By now extending the project into Wikidata, we will connect the archival work already underway with open knowledge platforms, thereby ensuring that the NNOC’s history is accessible not only to specialists but to a global community of researchers, students, and the public.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Culture, heritage or GLAM
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Identify Topics for Impact
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
This project is designed not only to improve Wikidata but also to generate insights for other cultural heritage efforts. We want to learn what data modeling practices are most effective for representing opera companies, performances, and networks in Wikidata, and how these practices can be aligned with community norms. We also want to test how linking Wikidata items to SNAC identifiers enhances the discoverability of archival collections, and whether this approach can be scaled to other organizations and cultural histories.
We are equally interested in learning how best to collaborate with Wikimedia communities on specialized projects and what forms of feedback are most effective. Another important area of inquiry is pedagogy: we want to explore how graduate students engage with Wikidata editing as part of a scholarly digital humanities project, and what training resources are most effective in that setting. Finally, we hope to evaluate how linked open data visualizations—SPARQL queries, Scholia pages, and Commons-hosted graphs—change the way scholars and the public encounter the history of African American opera, and whether these tools stimulate new avenues for research.
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 100 | This project will directly impact a small but growing body of scholarship around the arts in D.C., including, but not limited to members of the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, and the Music Library Association. It will furthermore interact with the records associated with the National Negro Opera Company (housed at the Library of Congress) and other federal institutions (including the NGA). It will similarly interact with the SNAC linked archives project, enriching their related entries and increasing access and awareness of this company, with the hope of increasing scholarly publications and attention. |
| Number of editors | 20 | We intend to engage students in both of our institutions (University of Maryland and Towson University) in creating and enriching the metadata of Wikidata entries and SNAC elements. Many of these will be first-time users, which also provides the opportunity to engage in pedagogies around Wikidata, accessibility of archival materials, and metadata practices more broadly. |
| Number of organizers | 2 | Jessica Grimmer & Christina Taylor Gibson |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
N/A
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
No
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
We would like to attempt to track visits to the Wikipedia articles of the National Negro Opera Company, Mary Cardwell Dawson, and related pages. We'd also like to track increases in requests to the archival materials linked through the knowledge graph at the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and the Phillips Collection. Finally, we'd like to track any increased traffic to SNAC by researchers who find topics/subjects through the knowledge graph. We would appreciate any support in these efforts.
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
5000 USD
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
5000 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
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- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).