GLAM/Newsletter/July 2020/Contents/Brazil report
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Important records of Brazilian history: images, metadata and edit-a-thons
The Wiki Movimento Brasil UG organized a series of events, established new partnerships and uploaded special images on ongoing GLAMs initiatives in July, with more to come in August. In this edition of the newsletter, you find the main activities developed in Brazil in the period and can easily access the links regarding them. Enjoy!
Image and metadata uploads
In July 2020, Wiki Movimento Brasil uploaded several batches of content through GLAM-Wiki partnerships with Brazilian institutions. In total, more than 680 metadata were shared on Wikidata and 220 images on Wikimedia Commons.
At first, we made the notebook of Aimé-Adrien Taunay available, in the context of the Museu Paulista GLAM. This document is considered one of the rarest items in the institution's collection and is very relevant to the history of Brazil, as it is a travel report produced during the period of exploration of the territory that is currently the southeast of the country, close to Rio de Janeiro. The notebook has illustrations and notes from 1828, with descriptions of animals, plants, people and places, which are still useful for research and teaching in different areas of knowledge.
Sharing this notebook was also useful for us to carry out our seventh edit-a-thon with this institution, the Ilustração científica: Taunay e Florence, in addition to illustrating the page about the work, Caderno de notas de Aimé-Adrien Taunay, on Wikipedia in Portuguese. It is also very important to mention the Instituto Hercule Florence, a new GLAM-Wiki partnership of the WMB and the institution that helped to digitize this item.
Next, WMB also made 470 metadata available in the GLAM of the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS). The items are from works by renowned photographers, such as Marc Ferrez, Georges Leuzinger and Augusto Malta, who photographed between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, recording rare and historic scenes, mainly from the city of Rio de Janeiro. In a few days, we will make the images of this upload available on Wikimedia Commons as well.
Finally, at the end of July, we also worked on making available another lot from the Museu Paulista GLAM, in the Santos Dumont Collection. There were 210 new items on Wikidata and 223 images on Wikimedia Commons, in this category. Among them are photos of the plane 14-bis and its flight at Campo de Bagatelle. In this same batch, there are records of the episode in which Dumont goes around the Eiffel Tower with his airship, in 1901, in addition to several images of the personal life of the aeronaut and several of his aeronautical inventions.
Santos Dumont is an important Brazilian historical figure, because he was one of the most famous people of the beginning of the 20th century, due to his air navigation inventions, for being the first person to take off a plane powered by a gasoline engine and is, also, considered by many to be the true inventor of the plane.
Edit-a-thons and Workshops
WMB ran in July three edit-a-thons on GLAM related topics and will be organizing one more in August. The user group also had one technical training on Wikidata, realized under the Museu Paulista partnership. All the events are happening on the online format due the pandemic in Brazil.
- Art+Feminisms: Art & Archive: This was the third event in partnership with Art+Feminism, NaPupila collective and Instituto Moreira Salles. The partnership involves a curatorial work to identify reliable sources for improving Wikipedia’s content on women of the arts. Inspired by the International Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women’s Day, we gathered on a Saturday more than 50 people on Zoom for a seminar on the decolonial practice and on the archives at the Instituto Moreira Salles. Then, on Sunday, we gathered more than 20 people to edit entries on Wikipedia on black women and to honor the work of the artist Silvana Mendes. More events like this to come!
- Cartographies and territories: The Museu Paulista events are composed by a webinar followed by a practical activity online. All the videos from this activity are available on our YouTube channel. We explored on this webinar the collaborative mapping process based on OpenStreetMap developed for the museum. The editing part of the event was focused on the museum’s map collections.
- Scientific illustration: Taunay e Florence: The main theme of this event was the scientific expeditions in Brazil during the early 19th century. The beautiful works of Aimé-Adrien Taunay and Hercule Florence were responsible for the depiction and study of Brazilian fauna, flora and ethnography at the time and now get to us through GLAM partnerships. The audience were introduced to GLAM processes, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikisource. The event also celebrated the new partnership with the Instituto Hercule Florence, responsible for the restoration of Taunay’s notebook, available now on Commons.
- Wikidata Lab XXIV: relative digital positioning: Wikidata Lab is a technical training on Wikidata related tools. This edition of the event was focused on the relative digital positioning practices, exploring the IIIF protocol potentialities for GLAM purposes. The practical activity was to identify buildings with support of the tool Wikidata Image Positions of a batch of São Paulo pictures of the 40s and 50s by the photographer Werner Haberkorn. The images were uploaded on Commons due the Museu Paulista GLAM Wiki initiative -- and they are beautiful!
- Santos Dumont: This upcoming edit-a-thon is the 8th and the last of a series in partnership with Museu Paulista. In August 21st, we’ll host an event on the museum’s collections of the pioneer aviator and inventor Alberto Santos Dumont. WMB just uploaded the first batch of the Santos Dumont collection on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons and it will be used for the activity.
New GLAM partnerships
At the end of June, we made one of the new WMB GLAM partnerships finally official, the GLAM Bibliotecas da USP, with two libraries: Biblioteca Carlos Benjamin de Lyra, from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Biblioteca da ECA, from the School of Communications and Arts. Soon, we will ratify a partnership with the Biblioteca da FAU, from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. We took the opportunity in the publication this newsletter to broadcast the collaboration documents and to announce that the activities of this initiative are already in full power!
We would also like to announce the partnership with the Instituto Hercule Florence, which has already helped us in the event Ilustração científica: Taunay e Florence, for the Museu Paulista GLAM, and helped with the digitization of the Aimé-Adrien Taunay notebook (as mentioned above). We expect great results from this partnership since the collection of this institution is historically rich and has works by Hercule Florence, an inventor, designer, polygraph and pioneer of photography in Brazil.
Finally, WMB is still working on developing a partnership with the Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência and another heritage institution. Two other very important GLAM partnerships in the group are also undergoing renovation and expansion. Must-see news coming soon!
Wikicontest with the Brazilian National Archives
We’re glad to announce that WMB is helding the second wikicontest on Wikipedia with a major cultural institution in Brazil! The editing competition intends to improve entries related to the Brazilian capital, Brasília, on Wikipedia and encourage the use of the more than 10 thousand images of the Brazilian National Archives collection uploaded on commons through the GLAM partnership ongoing since 2017.
To open the contest, WMB organized a webinar with the Brazilian National Archives team to introduce the initiative and give a tutorial on how to edit Wikipedia for the contest. More than 500 people registered for the contest and they’ll be improving content related to Brasília on portuguese Wikipedia until mid September.
