A Beginning for the Semester

This semester I will be doing GLAM-Wiki activities with the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/ ) as part of an internship. If you aren’t aware, GLAM-Wiki is an effort to bring the knowledge from those who manage Galleries, Libraries Archives and Museums (GLAMs) onto the open access Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia in order to further public access to our global cultural heritage (for more information check out http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM , there will be more information about GLAM-Wiki in future posts). I will be running this blog (my first) in order to document and reflect on the various elements of the internship. I am documenting the project because the academic humanities have been largely ignored by the Wikimedia community – the GLAM-Wiki community has been good at reaching out towards traditional museums and other cultural institutions (partnerships have included the British Museum, British Library, Smithsonian, Versailles, etc) and recent efforts with scientific organizations have been very successful in sharing these cultural institution resources with an interested public. I believe that Wikipedia and digital humanities (DH) clearly have aligned functions within the internet ecosystem (both profile knowledge and knowledge resources), and that, like GLAMs, if DH projects want to be relevant to researchers and the public, they must engage with Wikipedia, which is core to internet infrastructure and access as a top ten website. The William Blake Archive, one of the early trend setters of digital humanities projects, seems like an excellent DH project to explore the potential of DH/Wikipedia collaboration, and these blog posts this semester, hopefully, will explore most of the theory and logistics that go into practicing DH GLAM-Wiki. Before we get there though, I thought I might share a little bit about me.

I am a masters student of English Literature and Culture Studies at Kansas State University.Within my research, I focus on the place of history and the historical in public discourse, masculinities and subculture, and environmental rhetoric about food in contemporary literature. I am also a budding Digital Humanities practitioner. My involvement in DH started when I started contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as User:Sadads early in my undergraduate career. Since, I have begun exploring the place of academic activity in Wikipedia and it’s role as the center of free internet knowledge, through projects like GLAM-Wiki and the Wikipedia Education Program (https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program). In digital humanities, I am particularly interested in what the private sector has called “Knowledge Management”, that is managing information and knowledge and it’s sharing on social platforms, like wikis and blogs, so that the people who need it can get access to it, improving quality and efficiency in any organization’s activities. Since joining Wikipedia, I have always thought of the project as the ultimate academic knowledge management (KM) platform: it provides the ultimate bridge between academic resources, information and researchers through it’s citations and links. The GLAM-Wiki community seems to be at the forefront of fulfilling this academic KM connection, actively lobbying members of the GLAM community (academics) to build information and connect resources through Wikimedia platforms. In a future blog post, I will elaborate more on the connection between KM, DH, and GLAM-Wiki.

I hope the semester goes well and I look forward to sharing my experiences with DH and Wikipedia. If you questions or thoughts on what I should share about my experience, please leaves questions and comments below, it always helps to know what an audience is thinking!