wikidata Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

The Painter Goblin becomes corporeal by having its prints converted from digital to canvas in real life. In this image, the Painter Goblin canvases arer bathed in sunlight provided by a west-facing window around sunset. The grid used to display the Painter Goblin in a salon style shadowed by the window frame onto the wall. The light in this image has been enhanced to increase its saturation to mirror the vibrancy of The Painter Goblin's original image.

The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal

When you move country you have to be prepared to change quite a lot about your life. Back at the end of 2020, apart from literally everything else going on my partner and I also moved from Canada to Germany.

For me, this was my fifth or so international move (including shorter temporary stays) in as many years.

Being able to pick up sticks and move like that means living a drastically minimized life. Most of the things you have fit in a suitcase. Most of the things you have are small, and largely not overly whimsical. Sure, you can fit a few treasures into your bag, but you learn to value small ones, not things you might otherwise use to decorate an entire apartment!!

So, what do you do when you do have an apartment to decorate?

You ask the best known painter in your family to conjure some magic, The Painter Goblin!

"Bei der Buche", a landscape architectural installation by landscape architect and photographer Karina Raeck. Created in 1993 in the Wartberg area north-east of Stuttgart.

wikidata + mediawiki = wikidata + provenance == wikiprov

Today I want to showcase a Wikidata proof of concept that I developed as part of my work integrating Siegfried and Wikidata.

That work is wikiprov a utility to augment Wikidata results in JSON with the Wikidata revision history.

For siegfried it means that we can showcase the source of the results being returned by an identification without having to go directly back to Wikidata, this might mean more exposure for individuals contributing to Wikidata. We also provide access to a standard permalink where records contributing to a format identification are fixed at their last edit. Because Wikidata is more mutable than a resource like PRONOM this gives us the best chance of understanding differences in results if we are comparing siegfried+Wikidata results side-by-side.

I am interested to hear your thoughts on the results of the work. Lets go into more detail below.

Making DROID work with Wikidata

Wikidata is a good service, Wikibase (on which Wikidata is built) is a better platform.

I have spoken before about its potential to be added into the file-format registry ecosystem in a federated model.

If we are to use it as a registry that can perhaps complement the pipelines going into PRONOM, e.g. in vendor’s digital preservation platforms such as the Rosetta Format Library, a Wikidata should be able to output different serializations of signature file for tools such as Siegfried, DROID or FIDO.

Siegfried ✅: https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried/wiki/Wikidata-identifier
Fido ❌: I’ll need to revisit this!

And what about DROID?

Image of Spadina Quay Wetland Toronto, taken in 2017

We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata

Andy Jackson is doing some positive work for the DPC, especially in his low-level look at Wikidata recently (external blog).…

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.

Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.

A photograph of a blue neon sign with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations: "276. “But don’t we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a color and name our color impression?” It is virtually as if we detached the color impression from the object, like a membrane. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)"

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

When I visited the Brooklyn Museum in February they were in the middle of their Infinite Blue exhibition. Surveying the entire collection, Infinite Blue collected museum objects that prominently featured the color blue. Part of their Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum.

A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum presents the history of feminism and feminist art while showcasing contemporary artistic practices and new thought leadership.

While not explicitly stated in their literature, Blue seems to have been selected by the museum’s curators for embodying core feminist values:

In cultures dating back thousands of years, blue—the color of the skies—has often been associated with the spiritual but also signifies power, status, and beauty. The spiritual and material aspects of blue combine to tell us stories about global history, cultural values, technological innovation, and international commerce.

Rendition of Mondrian: Composition with Grid 1 from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, remixed by the Painter Goblin

The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five

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!

Two Cats, by John Singer Sargant and remixed by The Painter Goblin. The original can be seen at The Metropolitan Museum in New York

The Painter Goblin Visits The Met’s Top Ten

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 Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

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:

Maria Krzymuska — Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28727544

I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.

The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…

Following the previous posts, bringing this all together meant three different applications.

paintergoblin.py – creates the images, can be run standalone
wikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL services
twittergoblin.py – tweets for us! Either a random Wikidata image or from am existing Wikidata link

We 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?

Tag: wikidata

The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal

wikidata + mediawiki = wikidata + provenance == wikiprov

Making DROID work with Wikidata

We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five

The Painter Goblin Visits The Met’s Top Ten

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…

Follow ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog