GLAM/Newsletter/October 2019/Contents/Finland report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue X, October 2019

Finland report

Collaborative histories

Indigenous matters at WikidataCon

Kimberli Mäkäräinen and Susanna Ånäs presented Wikimedia Finland's initiatives and experiences with the Saami languages and culture at WikidataCon. Our work was ignited by facilitating the use of the Skolt and Inari Saami languages in Wikidata for recording concepts and lexemes, even though these language communities of 300–400 speakers each would likely be too small to maintain their own Wikipedia. Yet working with Wikidata opens up new opportunities for these languages when content is tagged with multilingual tags in GLAMs, broadcasting companies, Wikimedia Commons, etc.

Language issues were also in the spotlight of the Indigenous knowledge meet-up led by Stacy Allison-Cassin. The group felt that Traditional Knowledge and copyright in the Wikimedia projects also requires coordination. For this, a dedicated user group could be formed, or work could be coordinated with existing groups for languages and diversity.

Authority data in Finnish GLAMs

Mikko Lappalainen of the Finnish National Library and Susanna Ånäs from Wikimedia Finland prepared a presentation together about recording places and place names within Finnish memory institutions for WikidataCon. Wikidata offers an attractive way of modelling changing places, and lexicographical data makes it possible to record their names in all their variations, including in under-resourced languages.

After WikidataCon, the National Library arranged a workshop to further explore the opportunities of Wikidata and Wikibase in mobilizing authority data. The workshop was a combination of hands-on data modelling in a fresh Wikibase and exchanging thoughts about library data with Barbara Fischer from the German National Library and Jens Ohlig from Wikimedia Deutschland.

Helsinki Rephotography's October

In October, we continued to refine our Helsinki photography walks. Sandra organized 6 guided walks with local history groups in Helsinki.

Our method was to have first a presentation indoors about the topic of the walk, which included a short tutorial about taking rephotos. After the presentaton, we walked a pre-planned route with a guide who showed historical photos of the area and told participants about the history of the area. At selected key points, we took re-photographs of the area. Some of the participants used the Ajapaik app, while others used their cameras and mobile phones without having any special rephotography software on them.

Two of the walks were about the history of the Alppila and Töölö districts, one was about the art in the Helsinki university buildings, one about the life of Finnish photographer Signe Brander, and two were about defunct neighbourhood movie theaters in Kallio. The movie theater walks included visits inside three of the old movie theaters. Two of the theaters had been repurposed, but one was still a movie theater. We repeated some of the walks several times because we assumed that the weather in October would be quite bad. This proved to be a good idea, as it was raining and sleeting during three of the six walks. Being accustomed to this type of fall weather, we still had at least 10 participants on these days. When the weather was better, more than 30 rephotographers participated in our walks.

Our partners for the walks were Kallion kulttuuriverkosto, Helsinki City Museum, Guided Art Historical Tours at the University of Helsinki campuses, Hanna Partnership House, and Töölö Library. The walks were also covered by the media. For example, the local newspapers in Helsinki interviewed us and articles were published in the Töölöläinen and Meri-Helsinki newspapers. Sandra was also interviewed on Yle Radio Suomi.

Collaborative Game Histories

On October 18–19, 2019, Wikimedia Finland participated in the Collaborative Game Histories seminar at the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere. Haltiamieli participated in both the seminar and the workshop day.

On the workshop day, Haltiamieli and Zache had a Wikimedia table at the event together with two other community groups: Pelikonepeijoonit and Kasettilamerit, who have also worked with the Museum of Games before. Pelikonepeijoonit was a key group for creating the museum with their skills and collection of game hardware. At the event, they did an extensive presentation about their work with the museum and the collection itself.

Wikimedia Finland presented our long-time collaboration with documenting Finnish game culture in the Finnish Wikipedia. Our work with the museum started before the Finnish Museum of Games was even founded, since we worked with its predecessor, the media museum Rupriikki. Our work continued with the the Finnish Game Museum Wikiproject, writing about the games included in the first exhibition of the game museum. Our latest project was the Wikidata-focused Edit: History project by Olimar.

One very interesting topic at the event was the Art of Coding project, which aims to inscribe the demoscene on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. This is a joint effort with underground hackers, mainstream demoscene, and researchers and has support from the Finnish Heritage Agency.

The event was co-organized by the Finnish Museum of Games, the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, and the University of Turku.

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