Wikidata:WikiProject Artists' Publishing

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Property proposals

Goals

Long term goals

• Develop a robust linked data model which can be used for archiving and documenting works of art produced in the form of artists’ publications

Short term goals

• Document the workshops, special interest meetings and discussions taking place as part of the Banner Repeater Digital Archive project
• Suggest more properties & qualifiers that are needed to semantically describe items
• Create featured items that show how properties & qualifiers should be used
• Recruit more participants

Aim and Scope

The aims of setting up this WikiProject page is to establish a common space where different practitioners and researchers can discuss the issues around modelling data to represent artists’ publications for the purposes of archiving, documentation or preservation within institutional archives and collections. Through facilitating discussion, a further aim for this Project Page is to also propose specific data structures to be used both in Wikidata and/or federated Wikibase instances. Currently few such artworks are represented in Wikidata while existing Project Pages in the category of Cultural WikiProjects or WikiProject Books primarily discuss traditional forms of art, such as paintings, or traditional bibliographic information suitable to commercially published books. The requirements of describing and archiving artists’ publications – which are not just instances of printed matter, but artworks in their own right – are very different from the requirements of describing traditional forms of art, therefore this page aims to address the specificity of the creation, distribution, (re-)publication, (re-)appropriation, etc. of these artworks. The scope of this Project Page is limited to artists’ publications, rather than just any form of art publishing. Artists’ publications are not monographs or art history books published by commercial publishers, rather they are works of art in their own right, oftentimes self-published by the artist, artist collective or specialist publishing organizations. These publications may or may not be commissioned by an art institution or gallery. They may or may not have an ISBN. Their forms of distribution and exhibition are oftentimes crucial parts of the artistic intention. They may be distributed via standard book publishing distribution channels, or not. They may be printed via strandard lithographic processes, or utilize print-on-demand and other DIY digital printing tactics. In some cases, an artist publication may not have a printed analog form at all, or even a digital surrogate one, but rather take the form of a performance, lecture, workshop, and other time-based events.

Use cases

These characteristics, which distinguish artists’ publishing from other more conventional forms of both art making and book publishing, pose multiple challenges to traditional content management, archival and collection management systems currently in use in archives, libraries and other institutions. However, these publications form an important part of the collective cultural heritage landscape and, therefore, there is a need to address these challenges and develop robust ways of describing these artworks in structured, machine-readable data formats.

Banner Repeater (Q4856925) is an artist-led non-profit contemporary art organization, a reading room, and experimental project space, based in London. The reading room holds a permanently sited public archive of artists’ publishing, that provides an important bibliographic resource that all visitors can browse, alongside a digital archive of artists’ publishing. Banner Repeater have teamed up with Wikimedia UK to develop a custom instance of Wikibase (Q16354758) for the collection management and archival description of the publications in the archive. Wikibase facilitates the relatively easy creation, management and querying of a linked data database, and offers numerous advantages for the heterogeneous collection of artworks in the Banner Repeater archive. Custom properties can be created for the cases when traditional bibliographic standards or the existing structures of data in Wikidata are insufficient to describe the specificity of artists’ publishing. In addition, Wikidata can play an important role as a central hub for disambiguation, for linking the records of multiple organizations (via exact match (P2888)) or various external identifier properties) and for reducing data redundancy. This Project Page aims to link Banner Repeater’s case study with existing research and development work going on in other organisations exploring the use cases of linked data for the description of artists’ publications.

Data structure

The data structure(s) discussed on this Project Page takes as a primary case study the description of artists’ publications in Banner Repeater’s independent Wikibase installation. It is meant to be a departing point for a discussion, not a fixed final data model. Some properties used in Banner Repeater’s Wikibase do not yet exist in Wikidata, but if other individuals and organisations feel such properties would be useful for their archives and collections, we could propose their addition to Wikidata. Other properties and qualifiers are used in ways different to the commonly established practices in Wikidata (e.g. such as the WikiProject Books data structure), but they should be possible to be mapped relatively closely. The reasoning for this difference was driven by the specificity of the subject matter.

Workshop documentation

This Project Page also aims to document the findings from a 3-day long workshopping exercise conducted at Banner Repeater in July 2019. Participants in the workshops included subject specialists and researchers working with archives and collections in London, as well as the team behind the digital archive project at Banner Repeater. During these workshops the participants discussed the principles and benefits of using linked data for structuring heterogeneous collections, which do not easily fit pre-established standards. Additionally, participants looked at a number of current standards in linked data for cultural heritage, including CIDOC-CRM, FRBR, BIBFRAME, RDA, among others. The goal was to discuss which concepts from these standards would actually be useful to the case study at hand, rather than simply adopt a single standard and force the data to conform to that standard. Additionally, the participants discussed a number of implementations of digital archive solutions for artists’ publishing within institutions, publishers and booksellers, among them The Special Collections at Chelsea College of Arts Library, Post-Digital Publishing Archive, Artists Books Online, Edcat, Printed Matter, Book Works, Specific Object, Public Collectors, Art Metropole, and others.

Additional information

• More information about the project and the whole team is available here.

Participants

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