Digital scholarship blog

Wikimania is often the highlight of any Wikimedian’s calendar. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimania is a conference like no other. A large number of participants take part in the annual celebration of open knowledge and Wikimedia projects. Previous events have taken place in  Stockholm (2019), Cape Town (2018), Montreal (2017) and Italy (2016). Due to the ongoing global pandemic situation, this year's conference being held 13-17 August 2021 is taking place entirely online, something Wikimania is ideally suited for!

In addition to more traditional conference sessions, Wikimania will be running an Unconference, a Community Village, and a community Hackathon. Communication is encouraged through a variety of channels including Telegram, IRC and Wiki talk pages.

A photograph of an old telegraph key by Sandra Tan on Unsplash

Looking at the programme, so many interesting topics are on the table for presentation and discussion: from copyright reform, to innovation and community development, there’s a wide spectrum of material to interest all Wikimedians of every level. Handily, events are rated in terms of their suitability for beginners, to make things as welcoming as possible. There is a whole strand of presentations devoted to Wikidata, which you can view here.

I am very excited to be presenting remotely at this conference on behalf of the British Library. I will be introducing the work of Tom Derrick on the Bengali Books Wikisource Competition, and Dominic Kane (UCL) on the India Office Records project. We have shaped our panel to show what GLAM institutions can do to promote and effectively utilise Wiki platforms for public engagement with library and archive collections. Our panel will run on Sunday 15th of August at 8.15pm (7.15pm UTC).

Wikimania is free to attend online, 13-17 August 2021, registration is open until midnight on Thursday 12th August. We hope to see you there!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian)

Researching how to collect, curate and preserve emerging formats is important work for us in the Library. Fortunately we aren't alone in our quest to understand how to manage born digital collections, we are active members of organisations such as the Digital Preservation Coalition and the Videogame Heritage Society, which are excellent networks and forums for us to share and learn from fellow GLAM professionals working in this area.

The Videogame Heritage Society (VHS) is a subject specialist network for digital game preservation, led by the National Videogame Museum (NVM), based in Sheffield. They provide advocacy, support and expertise on the preservation of digital games and digital game culture through a network of museums, heritage institutions, developers, publishers, private collectors and anyone with an interest in videogame history.

The VHS launch event on 21 February 2020 was one of the last physical events I attended before the first Covid-19 lockdown started. Due to the global pandemic, the NVM had to completely re-think how to deliver their programme of planned VHS events, and this has produced a new series of online events called VHS Tapes, which started in February 2021.

At these events, VHS lead Mikey, has been in conversation with members of the VHS community regarding the many issues surrounding digital game preservation, exhibition, and collection. Recordings of these can be found on the NVM's YouTube channel, in this playlist. They include conversations with the NVM's Conor Clarke,  Foteini Aravani from the Museum of London and The Retro Hour Podcast. Not wanting to miss out on the fun! The British Library are invited speakers at an upcoming online VHS Tapes event on Tuesday 29 June 2021, 14:00-15:00, places are free, but please book here.

Lynda Clark, Giulia Carla Rossi and I will talk about the British Library’s research in collecting, curating and preserving emerging formats. Including eBook mobile apps, and web-based interactive works, such as those made with tools like Twine, which form the Interactive Narratives and New Media Writing Prize special collections in the UK Web Archive. We’ll discuss digital tools used to build these web archive collections, some of the content and themes of the interactive works collected, and the Library’s plans for the future. We hope to see you there!

An attendee working with the digital interactive writing tool Twine at a 2018 British Library Interactive Fiction Summer School course

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) 

Folks interested in creative reuse of digitised sound recordings, may want to come along to the "Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!)" online conference this Saturday (12th June 2021), organised by The Folklore Library & Archive. Where Cheryl Tipp, the British Library's Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds and I will give a talk on how the Library’s sound archive has been innovatively used to create atmospheric soundscapes both in the virtual landscapes of videogames, and for physical sites of archaeological interest, such as Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre. Plus how the Wildlife and Environmental Sounds collection has been interpreted in other artistic projects, including visualisations by Andy Thomas, and some delightful needlework by textile artist Cat Frampton.

The Folklore Library & Archive artwork by Rhi Wynter

In our presentation we'll mention entries in the Off the Map competition, such as Midsummer by Tom Battey. Submissions to the recent Games in the Woods game jam for the Urban Tree Festival, such as Noisy Wood by Ash Green.

Also the fantastic Faint Signals by Invisible Flock, an interactive virtual woodland sound experience, which has been featured recently by Europeana Pro in an article on Seven tips for digital storytelling with cultural heritage, and in this BBC Culture story about The sounds that make us calmer.

Faint Signals by Invisible Flock

The conference will be held online via Zoom, with ticket money going towards the Folklore Library and Archive’s appeal to save the archive of the late folklorist Venetia Newall. Furthermore, all ticket holders will be able to access video replays of the talks after the event, go here for booking your place. There is a stellar line-up of speakers from other organisations, including:

• Jim Peters, Collections manager (Dept of Prehistory and Europe) from the British Museum talking about his favourite objects from the collections.
• Alexandra Stockdale-Haley from the National Science and Media Museum, talking about The Cottingley Fairy artefacts and their role in the modern day.
• Librarians from Senate House Library giving a presentation on The Harry Price Library of Magical Literature.
• Geraldine Beskin, owner of the Atlantis Bookshop talking about Ghosts of the Theatre.
• Rachel Morris, co-founder of Metaphor Museum Designers, speaking about the role of the archive in Museums and how to interpret it.
• Peter Hewitt, founder of the Folklore Museums Network talking about their work bringing museums together.
• Clare Smith, Historical Collections Curator from the Metropolitan Police Museum giving a talk on The Crime Museum fact vs fiction, and other police artifacts.
• Lucy Gibbon, Acting Senior Archivist from Orkney Library & Archive will round off the event with stories from the Orkney Archives.

Programme for the Libraries & Museums & Archives (Oh My!) conference

 We hope to see you there! Do follow #folklorelibrary for twitter chat during the conference.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) 

The Urban Tree Festival got off to an active start on Saturday, including launch events for our tree themed Wikipedia edit-thon and our Games in the Woods game jam. If editing Wikipedia to add and improve articles about trees sounds like your jam, please do join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (passcode: vmqytwdr) if you haven't already, so your edits will count towards our stats for #wiktreepedia tracked activity. However, if making games and writing interactive stories is more up your tree-lined avenue, then read on.

Games In the Woods is an online jam running all this week, until midnight on Sunday 23rd May. You are welcome to join alone or in a team to create digital and analogue games, interactive fiction, web comics, board games, escape games, card games – anything you want! We especially encourage creative re-use of images from the British Library’s Flickr collection of digitised 19th century books, do check out these online Flora and Fauna galleries. There is also a fabulous curated selection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings picked by Cheryl Tipp, available via this SoundCloud playlist, which you can use in your creations. 

At the jam's launch event, Ash Green gave a brilliant Bitsy tutorial (we blogged about Bitsy last week), and Marion Tessier shared our Games in the Woods Luography and tree themed BoardGameGeek Geeklist, as we appreciate not everyone may want to make games, but lots of people enjoy playing them. If you have a favourite game about trees, please do tell us.

We also provided an introduction to Twine, which is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. Slides from the launch event can be found here and here.

To get an idea of what you can do with Twine, we suggest reading some free tree themed interactive stories, which others have created using the tool. Both The Old Woman in the Wood and Through the Woods Demo are part of an itch.io collection of tree themed games on itch.io that we have curated to inspire Games in the Woods jam participants.

On Saturday we also watched this useful video; Making Interactive Fiction with Twine, by Matt Allen from Closed Forum, which explains:

• Folder structures
• Making passages and links
• Hidden passage links
• Background, fonts and font size
• Style sheets
• Adding images, music and video
• Timed text and timed links
• Variables and if else statements

If you are interested in trying out Twine to write an interactive story, then these online resources can help you to get started:

• The Twine Cookbook, which contains documentation, tips, and examples for using Twine
• A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine 2.1 by Adam Hammond, which includes these useful videos:
  • Getting Started With Twine 2.1
  • Make Your Twine 2.1 Game Look Awesome with CSS (SugarCube 2)
  • Adding Images and Music to Your Twine 2.1 Game (SugarCube 2)
  • Variables, Conditionals, and Programming in Twine 2.1 (SugarCube 2)
• A Total Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CSS by Adam Hammond
• Twine for Beginners by Damon L. Wakes
• The Twine® Grimoire, Vol. 1, by G.C. Baccaris
• Video showing how to Publish Your Twine Game to Itch.io, by Eric Guadara

If you're new to using itch.io and participating in game jams, below is some advice about uploading and sharing your game. If you've created a game that is saved as a html file you can upload and allow people to play it on itch.io in their web browser, rather than getting people to download the file to play it. Both Bitsy and Twine, which we featured in the launch event save the games they produce as html files. To get the game to play in the browser tick the "This game will be played in the Browser" box underneath the filename you uploaded. If it's a game that can't be run in the browser leave the "This game will be played in the browser" box unticked.

When you upload a file and edit the game information page, it defaults to saving the page in draft. To publish it so everyone can see and play or download your game, select the "public" option under "visibility & access". To submit your game to the Games in the Woods game jam:

• Upload your game
• Then click on the Submit your project button
• Then select your game from the drop-down list that appears
• Click Submit

Good luck and have fun, we are looking forward to seeing, reading and playing your games.

This post is by Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom) with input from Ash Green (@ggnewed), Cheryl Tipp (@CherylTipp) and Marion Tessier from Kingston Libraries (@kinglibheritage).

We could not be more excited about the upcoming Urban Tree Festival and our Wikithon. If you’d like to join in the fun, there’s plenty of time! Come along to our online event on Saturday 15th May at 11:00 BST for free training and information. You do not need any prior Wikipedia experience and we have nurtured a forest of useful resources to share with you.

If you’d like to get a head start, you can read our handy guide to setting up your Wikipedia account. There is advice on creating your account, Wikipedia's username policy and how to create your user page.

Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our Urban Tree Wikithon dashboard (the enrollment passcode is vmqytwdr) and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:

• Wikipedia Essentials
• Editing Basics
• Evaluating Articles and Sources
• Contributing Images and Media Files
• Sandboxes and Mainspace
• Sources and Citations
• Plagiarism

These exercises aren’t time consuming – it’s definitely not an Entmoot situation – and they will help you prepare for editing Wikipedia during the Urban Tree Festival.

The easiest and swiftest way to verify your Wikipedia account is to do 10 small edits, one way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt (please make sure you are logged in for this!). For further information on adding citations, this video may be useful.

Treebeard and Hobbits, by Tom Loback, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

While it’s nice to be prepared, we understand that life is hectic and we are all busy bees, so if you don’t have a chance to do these activities in advance, it’s no problem. We will provide instructions on how to start from scratch at the session this Saturday.

Absolutely anyone can edit Wikipedia, and we can’t wait to help you on your way.

‘Tree’ you later!

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) & Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom). Embedded videos are by Ewan McAndrew (@emcandre), Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.

If there’s one thing we love here at the Library, it’s trees. They help make books, they’ve kept many of us grounded over the last year of Covid-19 lockdowns, and each and every one of them holds a unique and special history. London itself is home to over 8 million trees, trees like these in our towns and cities are celebrated annually by the wonderful Urban Tree Festival.

This year, the festival runs from 15–23 May and will consist primarily of online events. As part of the Wikimedia residency at the Library, we will be running an online Urban Tree Wikithon to create, edit and improve articles about trees on Wikipedia.

Working together with library innovator, Marion Tessier, literary tree enthusiast, Dr Danielle Howarth, plus Dr Sara Thomas and Stuart Prior from Wikimedia UK, we are excited to be exploring trees from many angles: historical (like some of the oldest trees in the UK), geographical (such as the most northern tree in the world), political (did you know about Glasgow’s Suffragette oak?) and literary (who could forget good old Treebeard or the Faraway Tree?).

The Suffragette Oak, in Glasgow, Scotland by Sara Thomas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you have a hankering for all things arboreal, come and join us - Wikipedia editing training will be freely provided at our online launch event on Saturday 15th May at 11:00 BST, plus there will be some drop-in online sessions through the week of the festival to support and nurture your article acorns.

No previous editing experience is needed, we will have a forest of useful resources, hints and tips to help guide you on your way. During the festival please use use #wiktreepedia on social media to share details of your work in progress, including links to tree related articles that you create or improve, or photographs of trees that you have added to Wikimedia Commons.

At the end of the festival, we will celebrate the fruits of our labours at a Show & Tell event on Sunday 23rd May at 11:00 BST.

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) & Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom).

Congratulations to the winner, runners up and everyone who made a game last month for Leeds Libraries Games Jam on Novels That Shaped Our World, which invited jammers to create playful interactive adaptations of books in the BBC’s Novels that Shaped Our World list. To accompany this jam, they programmed a fantastic series of events, which if you missed seeing live, or want to re-watch, can be found in this YouTube playlist.

I absolutely love the premise of the winning submission Frankenstein's Double Wedding, Or, The Modern P…romeo…ethius by WretchedBees (Will Binns). You need a deck of cards to play this solo or cooperative game. Playing as Dr. Frankenstein, with the help of both your monster and betrothed, the game’s aim is to organise a double wedding, arranging catering, a florist, a venue and inviting wedding guests. Not forgetting, that you also need to create a spouse for your monster, before you can both get wed.

Frankenstein's Double Wedding, Or, The Modern P…romeo…ethius by WretchedBees

Well deserved recognition also goes to the two runners up, these are The Open Wizarding Challenge by Suzini56, where to win, players navigate rooms and corridors of their wizarding school, dodging moving staircases and obstacles, aiming to be the first to reach the exit with their bag of collected items, picked up on the way. Also, Fortune of War: A game of Napoleonic era Naval Life by webcowgirl, which is based on Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander books. Writing about her submission she says “this game tries to capture the flavor of the books, with its humor and humanity. Winning isn't just about money, it is ultimately also about pride, honor, and dignity.” Something we would all do well to remember.

Fortune of War: A game of Napoleonic era Naval Life by webcowgirl

Other #NTSOWgamesjam submissions re-worked Pride and Prejudice, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. You can check these out on the jam’s itch.io entries page. Being a Sandman graphic novels fan, I enjoyed looking at Of You by DarrenLEdwards, which has been structured so this tabletop roleplaying game could also be based on many other fantastical worlds such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Neverending Story, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, The Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials etc.

Well I have posted my game for #NTSOWGamesJam it hasn't been tested, I hope that it is at least vaguely playable https://t.co/LGSGtS6bXF

This is the first #TTRPG that I have actually "finished", so it is good to get something out there even if it needs playtesting

— Darren Edwards (@DarrenLEdwards) April 25, 2021

If exploring fantasy worlds and playing games has inspired you to want to make a game, or if you are a seasoned game maker, then you may want to take part in our Games In the Woods jam this month, which I am running with Ash Green, Marion Tessier from Story Circles and Kingston Upon Thames Libraries, and Cheryl Tipp. This is an online tree themed game jam for all ages, which will run throughout the duration of the Urban Tree Festival. There will be an online launch event on Saturday 15th May with inspiring examples of interactive digital experiences featuring trees and a virtual “show & tell” event on Sunday 23rd May for jammers to celebrate their creations.

Before and during the Urban Tree Festival, game jammers can meet and chat with organisers and each other on our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/qWXH8NcjHE, so please join and say hello on there and use #gamesinthewoods on social media to share images and details of your work in progress.

Games in the Woods game jam

You are welcome to join alone or in a team to create digital and analogue games, interactive fiction, web comics, board games, escape games, card games – anything you want! The only constraints are time, the theme and your imagination. We especially encourage creative re-use of images from the British Library’s Flickr collection of digitised 19th century books, do check out these online Flora and Fauna galleries. There is also a fantastic curated selection of wildlife and environmental sound recordings picked by my colleague Cheryl Tipp, which you can use in your creations. These are available via this SoundCloud playlist.

Sue Thomas, Irini Papadimitriou and Cheryl Tipp

Cheryl is also speaking at a free Digital Nature online event next Monday, 10th May, 19:30 - 20:30. Chaired by Irini Papadimitriou, Creative Director at Future Everything, this event also features Ben Eaton from Invisible Flock (read more about their woodland work Faint Signals here), and author of books on nature and technology Sue Thomas. This is part of the British Library’s springtime season of events The Natural Word, which explores nature writing and reflects on our need to reimagine our relationship with the environment. Hope to see you there.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)

We blogged recently about IFLA’s Wikidata and Wikibase Working Group's preparations for the next #1Lib1Ref campaign, which runs from 15th May to 5th June 2021. The Wikidata project page for this work is here, which includes resources, such as this Zine about Wikidata.

Barnstar for partcipation in the 1lib1ref 2021 campaign, created for Polish Wikipedia, featuring the Owl of Athena symbol. If you don't know what a barnstar is, there is an explanation here.

There is a recording of the Train-The-Trainers workshop run by Meg Wacha, which took place on Wednesday 21st April, now available to watch on YouTube and the slidedeck from this session is here. Meg's presentation gave a great overview on how librarians can run events in their libraries to contribute to Wikidata during the #1Lib1Ref campaign period. Useful urls mentioned in this session, include:

• Wikimedia movement affiliates (How to find your local Wikimedia chapter)
• Wikidata's Community portal
• Slides on how to set-up a dashboard for 1Lib1Ref on Wikidata
• Wikidata Professional Development Training Modules by Wiki Education
• Wikidata Tours (Shows how Wikidata works and teaches how to add data)
• The University of Edinburgh's Wikimedian in Residence webpages on Wikidata

As a follow on from the Train-The-Trainers workshop, the IFLA group are hosting a series of five upcoming Wikidata in #1Lib1Ref online office hours, these have been scheduled for different times in the day, to support participation from all parts of the world. These sessions aim to provide librarians with opportunities to discuss Wikidata work with international colleagues. See below for details of dates and times:

• Wednesday 5th May at 15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST/The Hague, 14:00 UTC
• Tuesday 11th May at 23:00 BST, 00:00 CEST /The Hague, 22:00 UTC 
• Wednesday 19th May at 15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST/ The Hague, 14:00 UTC 
• Wednesday 26th May at 07:00 BST, 08:00 CEST/The Hague, 06:00 UTC
• Tuesday 1st June at 23:00 BST, 00:00 CEST/The Hague, 22:00 UTC

To book to attend these #1Lib1Ref online office hours, please fill in this online form and you will be sent the Zoom link. If you have any questions about them, please contact Camille Francoise ([email protected]). 

We also want to give a shout out to the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group, who hold bi-weekly Affinity Group Calls, Wikidata Working Hours, Wikibase and WBStack Working Hours throughout the year. Finally, being librarians, we recommend checking out this Bibliography of Wikidata, a continuously updated list of books, academic conference presentations, peer-reviewed papers and other types of academic writing, which focus on Wikidata as their subject.

This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian) & Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom). They will both be at the #1Lib1Ref online office hour on Wednesday 5th May.