Grants talk:Project/Tamil Wikimedia-Noolaham Foundation/Multimedia Documentation of Traditional Trades and Crafts of Eastern, Northern and Up-Country Sri Lanka/Midpoint

Report accepted

Dear Natkeeran, Mayooranathan, Sundar, கோபி, Sancheevis, and Parvathisri,

Thank you for submitting this informative report. I really appreciated your careful documentation of how this project has proceeded. It's very clear how much thought and care you are taking with this project and I feel privileged to get to be a part of it in a small way.

I am accepting it now with the following comments:

• The pictures that open your report are wonderful. What a great way to lead into your story.
• In reading your description of participants in your meetings, I am struck by the interesting diversity. For example, I am curious about the folk theatre artists!
• As I mentioned in our check-in today, there are a couple of places where links are missing in the report (for example, the minutes from the Skype conference calls, and details from the workshops and photographs of events).
• I strongly encourage you to write your learning pattern, required in your Final Report, as a documentation of lessons learned and recommended best practices for documenting intrinsic, oral or indigenous knowledge in the context of Wikimedia projects. I've captured below in my notes from our check-in some of your verbal comments on this subject so you can continue to think about them and work them into a text that you would be happy to share with the wider Wikimedia community.
• In reference to your question about best ways to batch upload media to Commons, I am pinging Alex Stinson, the GLAM-wiki Strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation. I think Alex will be interested in reading your report and will be able to offer guidance about how you can approach adding your materials to Commons.
• I will also be in touch with you about the possibility of publishing a blog post about your project. As I said in our call, let's try to plan for that to come out shortly after your Final Report so that readers of the blog can follow up and discover more information about your project.

I have approved your extension request at this link.

I am notifying our grants administrator that this report has been accepted.

Kind regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Notes from 9/1/18 Check-in

Participants:

• Natkeeran
• Srikanthaluxmy Arulantham
• Thivaharan Selvanayagam
• Prasad Sockalingam
• P. vijayakanthan
• Kopinatht

Highlights (apologies in advance for any misspellings - please feel free to edit/correct):

• Joining this call are some coordinators who joined the project via the workshops conducted earlier in the project, and who now lead fieldwork. Prasad is a prolific fieldwork contributor, and was one of the early workshop coordinators. In the workshops, he explained the social mission of this project and how we are documenting in all the regions. The coordinators who tend to the project through the workshops tend to already have an interest in this kind of work, and who are motivated to join us and stay on with the project. After they joined us, they worked with Prasad doing fieldwork to learn more about how he does it. Then, they started doing their own fieldwork. There are a team of four of them who are studying at university now. They had previously done some similar documentation work on their own via Youtube, however they have since been doing this kind of work in a more robust way, with a framework to properly guide documentation. Before, their efforts were not maturing into something that could be used by others. They were posting to Facebook etc, but with this project they have the guidance now to contribute an article, media for Commons and so forth.
  • Thiva is one of the people who engaged through the workshop and is now active in fieldwork in the eastern region.
  • Kopi is one of the original coordinators.
  • Thana is from the east, and joined after the eastern workshop; now leads a lot of fieldwork in east and some in north as well.
• Some of the things documented in the east so far:
  • Things used for kutu performances
  • Pottery (documentary)
  • Caneworks in which candy products are made from grass
  • Fishing techniques not used anywhere else in the world
  • Woodworking crafts
• Some of the things Thana has documented in the upcountry, in the hill region, where population is more disbursed and there is almost no internet access:
  • Documenting a lot of oral history.
  • Plan to do tea plantation coverage, vegetable production and musical instrument-making
  • The project got started almost one year ago now and has faced lots of challenges, due to climate and other obstacles.
  • They plan to widen their focus in the upcountry a little bit, collecting documentation not strictly about crafts, but also cultural and historical documentation as well. They have done quite a bit of oral history work there.
• Outreach and capacity building is also a focus of the project, not only documentation.
• Lessons learned about documenting oral/intrinsic knowledge:
  • Our goal for this project is to document things not covered in textual resources, things that don't often come through mainstream modes of documentation. You do have to engage with the local communities to achieve this. They have to be the agents of the documentation process. That is key. So if we are working in the upcountry, we will not bring someone from the north to document. We become the facilitators of the process. ** Editing a wiki article is challenging but contributing a photograph is not as challenging. Engaging through media, video, photographs, is important.
  • Critical part of this is fieldwork. We can't document marginalized communities without heavy fieldwork. ** The contest we did in Tamil WP did get a lot of content, but that content can sometimes be challenging to get to a place of cohesive knowledge. So you do need to have a focus area, like crafts, or some aspect of culture. Folk arts, for example, or some specific ethnographic subject area. You do need some focus and structure and guidance that is field specific. Otherwise, you wouldn't know what to document or have clear focus about what to document. Focusing on crafts puts attention on various aspects of issues that are all connected. Through oral histories, we have learned about some of the challenges they are facing - losing some of their commons. So, for example, in the garment efforts, they are reimagining and reintegrating the crafts. If you had too broad a theme, it can be challenging to know what exactly you are documenting and would be harder to collect meaningful knowledge.
  • Having smaller focused teams. Initially, we had 12-15 people trying to talk on Skype. This was not optimal. We found we needed to break up into smaller focused teams based on region or based on craft.
  • We started with a lot of workshops and outreach. One component has to be on capacity building.
  • Having a mixed skill set in team is important: Not all of us will be good photographers, so we made sure we had different specialities -- someone with a background in documentary making. That person might have really important knowledge, like keeping the camera low to the person interviewing, or other commonsensical tips for improving the value of the work. We are collecting information through pictures, oral histories, and face to face interviews. So we needed someone with expertise in processing the raw data that would result, and possible someone with additional knowledge about how to document well. In the oral history documentation, we take in data in the form of interviews and then we have to preserve it. From the gross interview documentation, someone must be able to select useful information from the text. Ideally, the interview should have some expertise about the other society. Various skillsets are useful... someone with domain knowledge, someone with editing and photographic or videographic background,
  • Takes a while to build trust with the communities being documented. Have to communicate that we are hoping to document those crafts they still have alive because some already vanished. It is the community who have the knowledge and they have to have the freedom to contribute. You should be able to give them some sort of platform/guidance so the people are really engaged to be at the center of the knowledge. Get the community involved in documenting then create a platform and a structure for sharing, a focus and a plan and guidance about what is needed. This will be different for each region, each knowledge, but slowly development a plan to document each knowledge area.
  • As you document what you plan to document, you also have to make sure you are clearly understanding why you documented it. And if a sensitive issue comes up that it might not be wise to share, you need to be clear about that. Some knowledge is too sensitive to share. For example, if the person still making a living out of the knowledge and it could undermine their livelihood to share it publicly. But some knowledge is not so sensitive and this is where we can focus. In some of the oral histories, people do reveal very private information that could be inflammatory to other communities. In that sense, we say, okay if it does not really add a lot of value to keep that section, we do edit it out if it could be inflammatory to one community or another. As project coordinators, we have to make sure we don't share that openly. We try to keep the focus of what we publish on knowledge of the process of the crafts without trying to get into private names, or any other information that could be easily misinterpreted. We edit this portion out and keep only details that can be help.
• The fieldwork makes up the majority of the work we have done so far. We were thinking fieldwork woudl be the most challenging, but it has been positively surprisingly that it has been the most rewarding and engaging aspect. We now have all those materials in hard drive and are developing a process of selection of photographs and videographs and putting together basic catalogues for each craft, and then uploading them to commons, archives. We are processing materials and also adding background information from other articles papers , etc.
• In the third phase (after workshops/outreach and fieldworks), we will have all this material from Wiki Commons. We hope to enrich WP and even Wiktionary with this content. I see that as a high level flow of these projects.
• The capacity building and outreach will continue to be a parallel aspect of project. We've been thrilled with Thana and some of the other new volunteers. Really happy to see them involved in this common platform.