ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
I’m heading to Houston for the first time this Friday, for ten-days. I can’t wait! To fill my time before I go, I thought I’d pay tribute to some of the artwork I might find there. Well, I say me, but I mean, I asked The Painter Goblin to make these pieces for me based on what it could find on wikidata.org. I like what it discovered!
Enjoy!
This week (beginning 7 August 2017) marks my second solo published peer-reviewed paper. Binary trees? Automatically identifying the links between born-digital records. I invite everyone to have a read and let me know what you think.
The paper won the Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award late in 2018.
Read the paper and additional thoughts below.
Inspired by a Creative Commons (CC) blog the Painter Goblin decided to tackle the top-ten visual artworks at The Met Museum (July 2017).
The blog discusses how folks are using CC search to find works held at The Met. The Painter Goblin has been using Wikidata to similar effect – an exploration – a technique grounded in happenstance to discover and understand art held in the fantastic list of institutions that make it available on the Wikidata/Wikimedia service. With little exception, The Painter Goblin cannot replace the original works but hopes that visually interesting/stunning remixes when they appear inspire others to indulge in their own discovery and works of creation.
Let’s see what our elusive basement goblin did with the top-ten listed above…
The work on the Painter Goblin is almost complete for now. The automation of their work is pretty much ironed out with regular tweets happening every night.
A recent favorite:
I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.
Following the previous posts, bringing this all together meant three different applications.
paintergoblin.py – creates the images, can be run standalonewikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL servicestwittergoblin.py – tweets for us! Either a random Wikidata image or from am existing Wikidata linkWe create Tweetable information using the wikigoblin. We perform the Tweet using twittergoblin. In between the paintergoblin has to create his art!
We’ve seen examples of the images from the original zine.
How do we turn this concept into something real, and automated?
