Technology

GLAMwiki Toolset

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Colleagues at Europeana have been working with Wikimedia in the Netherlands, UK, France and Switzerland to develop a powerful toolset that allows bulk importing of publicly available, openly licensed images, audio and video from GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) into Wikimedia. If you want to know why that’s valuable, I’ll get to that at the end.

Tomorrow (Saturday 7 June) I’ll be at the Wikimania Free Culture Weekend at the Barbican, London and thought I’d put a few personal notes and links together for anyone who is going along, or even if you’re not.

Find out more

So why is this important?

Taking Europeana as an example, it provides access to a diverse and rich collection of objects from over 2,300 cultural institutions across Europe – currently over 33 million items and growing every month. Additionally, with new initiatives such as Europeana 1914-18 there is also material submitted by members of the public, often associated with amazing personal stories. Crucially there’s a powerful API you can use to run queries, extract metadata, and create your own apps.  Every item has a clear license, and increasingly there’s direct access to digital files from the providers.

In my mind there’s no better single example than the image of the German balloon used to illustrate this article. Taken in Équancourt, France on 22 September 1916, it was brought into a Europeana 1914-18 roadshow by Christoph Herrmann as part of a unique personal collection. It was added to Europeana under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and through the API this made it immediately available for re-use.  It was uploaded to Wikimedia in June 2012 and the image is now in use on nine Wikipedia pages across five countries.

The GWToolset is making batch uploading of such images a possibility and so far over 21,000 images have been uploaded to Wikimedia in this way. 

The toolset is still in development and there are bugs that need ironing out and new features to add – all offers of help are gratefully received.

On the web, Technology

Testing the Europeana Search Widget

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Disclaimer: I work for Europeana. But this is still great and I would have blogged about it anyway!

I was prompted by a new blog post from my former Kew colleague Anna Saltmarsh – Plants to pixels: enhancing access to Kew’s herbarium collections – to have a closer look at the Europeana search widget. It can deliver targeted search results directly on external pages – everything from private blogs to institutional data provider websites. There’s a really handy wizard that lets you create your own widget, with different themes and styles to suit most needs. Crusially though you can also tap into the power of the Europeana API to control what is displayed and what your users can then search for.

Here’s an example of the code that allows you to quickly and easily search Kew’s content, in this case looking for palms:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.europeana.eu/portal/themes/default/js/eu/europeana/min/EuSearchWidget.min.js?sw=true&query=palm&qf=DATA_PROVIDER:{Royal+Botanic+Gardens%2C+Kew}&withResults=true&theme=dark&v=2"></script>

And a live example, looking at user-contributed content to the Europeana 1914-18 project:

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Embeddable images from external sources – a few tests

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With today’s announcement from Getty of an embeddable viewer, I thought I’d test a few related services and see how they work at both a technical and practical level. This page is just to demonstrate them, and I’ll write up results and opinions after I’ve had a chance to test them here.

Getty Images – Embed Viewer

Getty have announced a new embed code. It uses an iframe and comes with a standard size and format and a ‘robust’ set of terms and conditions. Further details and instructions at www.gettyimages.co.uk/Creative/Frontdoor/embed

Getty Images – WordPress plugin

With all the hype of the Embeddable Viewer launch, it seems the official Getty Images WordPress plugin has been rather overlooked (just over 400 downloads in 2 months is low for a mainstream WordPress plugin). It’s easy to find images and use them, but what’s with teh watermark, and the very first line of the conditions says “Grant of License. Getty Images grants to you, for a period of thirty (30) days, a non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-transferable and non-assignable right to use the image and/or film preview file you have selected and any derivatives or copies (collectively, the “Licensed Material”), on your personal computer and, in the case of film, in any test, sample, comp or rough cut evaluation materials. The Licensed Material may only be used in materials for personal, noncommercial use and test or sample use, including comps and layouts.” So can I even use this one here? I’m confused!

EDIT: After writing this and trying to publish the post I then got the message “WARNING: You may not publish posts with Getty Images comps. Download the image first in order to include it into your post.” which kind of explains this. So it’s really just a tool for publishers to find content and create drafts with a view to purchasing a license. That explains it I guess. But I wonder if they have missed a trick – why not add an option to the plugin which allows users to add the simple embed code into a WordPress post?

Flickr

Flickr provides embed code (using an iframe like Getty) or an html snippet (all subject to the owner’s privacy settings, but in the case of Flickr Commons both of these are available throughout). The player gives title and attribution, the ability to favourite (requires Flickr login), and also the navigation to other images, presumably adjacent images from the same user. Oddly the html code option has title and alt text for the link and image respectively, but does not visibly display the image title or owner.

Flickr embed:

Flickr html:

Dr William Bland, ca. 1845 / photographed by George Goodman

Pinterest

Pinterest is a slightly different case as it’s not a primary source for images, but I thought it was still interesting. They use an approach more like Facebook Like and Twitter buttons, displaying the Pin using javascript.
EDIT: I’m finding that the Pinterest code has a habit of corrupting when editing in WordPress, so it doesn’t look like it’s very WP friendly!
 

CulturePics

A month or two back I put together a small hack at culturepics.org using Flickr and Europeana images for people to create and download or link to at the specific size they needed. Providing easy-to-grab html snippets was a key feature.

Miss Sarah Hodges of Salem
Miss Sarah Hodges of Salem
Source: George Eastman House on Flickr Commons

Europeana

Thanks to David Haskiya from Europeana (see commment below) I’ve been pointed to this example from Europeana exhibitions of an experimental embed code.

Creative Commons License

Any more?

Any more suggestions of good (and bad) examples are welcome, and if you leave them in the comments I’ll add them in here.

Technology

Sentiment Analysis for Cultural Collection objects – aka how to identify the good stuff

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Forgive me if this is an old idea, but I wanted to throw it out there and see if it has any mileage.

Sentiment Analysis is a technique widely used in marketing, and especially social media, to get a measure of the popularity of a brand or product. My question is whether the same techniques could be used to find the very best stuff in cultural collections, based on what people are sharing and talking about online.

The problem is this: I regularly use online collections, whether via a web interface or increasingly through APIs, but almost always end up with a wide range of results that I have to scour through to extract what I would call the decent stuff. Yes, many collections provide tools where I can drill down by facets like date or keyword, or maybe if there is a digitised version available, but what about the less tangible measures around quality and interest – in other words the ‘wow factor’?

Flickr is the one tool I know where this is actually available – if you do a search or use many of the API methods you can sort by what they call ‘interestingness’, a mystical measure based on an unknown formula that involves the number of Likes, Comments, Views, Tags and no doubt other factors. They even tried to patent the concept of interestingness and have no doubt, like Google’s rankings, continuously tweaked the algorithm over time.

So, whether it’s a small museum collection, or millions of records in aggregators like Europeana, DPLA or Trove, has anyone tried to do this for cultural collections and if not, how could it be done?

I’ve used the term sentiment analysis in the title of this post but I think it’s actually rather simpler than that, so here are a few examples of quantitative metrics I feel could provide the basis for this seemingly qualitative measure.

Web analytics – most collections with have Google Analytics or something similar measuring page views. Can we assume that the most visited objects are likely to be the best ones?

Referrals – taking one particular element of analytics, if people are being directed to specific objects from external sources (or even internal ones) surely this means that those objects have something of interest about them?

Social media – in a similar vein, if someone posts a link to an object, for example on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or any other social channel, even if that doesn’t result in any referrals it’s another sign that someone, for whatever reason, has identified it as being noteworthy. And thinking back to the actual practise of sentiment analysis, if the original post or any replies/comments use emotional, positive words then those would have to score even more highly.

So if we can extract those metrics and combine them in clever ways, won’t we be able to identify all the great stuff?

Without going into detail, here are some interesting links to explore:

On the web, Technology, Vintage photos

CulturePics – custom images from cultural collections

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A few weeks ago I undertook a quick challenge to come up with something to show how cultural collection APIs could be used to very quickly deliver simple tools aimed at reaching far beyond typical audiences, especially in the creative sector.

CulturePics website
CulturePics website

Without much time to spare it had to be simple, so my idea was a placeholder image service somewhat like placehold.it or placekittens.com.

I chose Flickr Commons and Europeana APIs, though the idea could easily be extended to any image collection accessible via an API. The development process was simple: ingest the image metadata via the APIs; create a basic script using ImageMagick which resizes images to custom dimensions; configure powerful but simple Apache redirects and regex so that images can be served up using clean urls based on a standard syntax; and finally wrap all this in a clean and easy user interface that works well on both desktop and mobile devices.

And so culturepics.org was born.

What is interesting is how things like the simple tag search has actually proved to be a useful cross-collection discovery tool, and how it has opened up other ideas like custom e-cards.

All other suggestions most welcome …

Technology

Sorting records on oldmapsonline.org by date and scale – a quick greasemonkey script

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oldmapsonline.org
oldmapsonline.org, with listings sorted by map scale

I was prompted by a tweet from Mia Ridge to have another look at the oldmapsonline.org site. Anything that has maps and history and a slick interface is going to be something I like! But I was struck by the fact that I couldn’t sort the map results that appear in the right hand panel by date or by the scale of the map. Sometimes if you’re researching a location you just want detailed maps, or to look at the oldest ones first (they do have a very nice date range filter, but no sort options).

So I’ve thrown together a very quick Greasemonkey script to help me, and I thought I’d share it. All it does is add two ‘sort’ links above the results panel. Click on either one and you’ll sort the records displayed in ascending order.

How to install

Greasemonkey runs in either Firefox (with the Greasemonkey extension installed) or Chrome. In Chrome it’s easiest to install the Tampermonkey extension to avoid problems with loading external scripts (which you can read about here).

Once that’s done, just click on this link - http://www.catchingtherain.com/scripts/oldmapsonline.user.js – to install it and then each time you load http://www.oldmapsonline.org it should automatically add the sort buttons. Just one caveat – the site has continuous loading of map items, meaning  that as you scroll to the bottom it will download and display more items. The tool will only work with records that have been listed, so scroll down first if there are lots of maps for the area and date range you’re looking at. That said, if you sort and then retrieve more items, just click the sort button again.