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!
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?
One thing that held the Painter Goblin project back was finding a data source to get images from.
There are potentially hundreds of sources out there, but! The path of least resistance means that:
** A hackable URI is a URI pattern that can be cycled through using computational techniques, even if the underlying data isn’t entirely well-known. E,g, http://example.com/image/0001, http://example.com/image/0002, for subsequent pages, for lack of a more concrete example.
I wanted to explore heritage sources such as Europeana, TROVE, DPLA. I struggled to search these effectively though, and struggled to see how I might automate using them. I recognise they have APIs. I’ll revisit them in the future as I look to expand the Painter Goblin’s corpus.
Enter Wikidata.
Continuing the story of the Painter Goblin and following part one, the idea of a Twitter bot started to form earlier this year.
In part 2 I take a very brief look at what is needed to write a bot and get it publishing.
Learn more below.
I wrote a new Twitter bot two weekends back: The Painter Goblin.
The Painter Goblin was inspired by a Zine I wrote in a different time, in 2015 for the Christchurch Zine festival, New Zealand.
The Zine itself was inspired by a story I had heard a few weeks earlier from someone who had seen this story on Reddit:
Every time I play the Sims, I start my family with a ‘painting goblin’.
I make him/her morbidly obese with green skin. I make sure to give him the following traits:
- Likes to be alone
- Lives art
- Hates the outdoors
The first thing I do once I have enough money, is build a small room in the basement, send him down there, and then remove the stairs. I set him up in a tiny little area with only an easel, a toilet, a refrigerator, a bed, a shower, and a trash bin.
All he does all day is paint. That’s it. He paints and paints and paints.
Eventually his paintings become very good and worth a lot of money. Every few minutes I go downstairs and sell whatever painting he has finished and then I return to playing the game.
My family always ends up feeling blessed because of their fortune, and they never find out about the horrible secret living beneath their home.
Lets take a look in more detail below.