 While I'm sharing my screen, unfortunately, I can't watch the chats. But I am relying on my wonderful team behind me. Oh, that's not the right button. To monitor the chat and let me know if anything comes up. But let me go ahead and first of all open my speaker now. And also say, hello, welcome. Thank you guys so much for joining us for this presentation. My name is Amanda figure out I am the community director of the curationist project. I'm really excited to use this this time we have together all 15 minutes of it to talk to you about this platform that we've been working on for quite some time, and about how it fits into this broader open knowledge ecosystem, and about how we truly are at curation is trying to reimagine what curatorial work looks like through open knowledge. Along the way will also do some interactive stuff, led by my colleague Neha, who will introduce yourself to you in just a moment. And we're also going to be able to show you guys the demo of what's to come for this platform in the very end so I'm going to hop right to it. Again, thank you all so so much for being here. What a compliments I have your close attention. So, our project is called curationist and right at the heart of that word is of course the word curation. All of us in sort of this Wikimedia community and all of us in open knowledge broadly understand that so much of our work is curatorial work is this work of taking care of organizing and making visible. All of the knowledge and all of these artifacts and all of these images that exist in the world. So the word curation and the the act of curation is a little sticky is always the word that I like to use for it it's sticky, primarily because, especially in the Western world, all of our curatorial work is rooted in a singular Western tradition and that tradition initially with what we could call cabinets of curiosities, the collections and the truly the literal cabinets that were put in in homes of wealthy people to sort of showcase their travels and showcase the places they've been in the wealthy to accumulate So when the British Museum was founded in 1753. It should be no surprise that it also took on that sort of cabinet of curiosities form, meaning that it really became a place for the might of the British Empire to be displayed, just like those Regency wealthy families were displaying artifacts from their travels. So to the British Empire was displaying evidence of their travels, primarily in the form of looted cultural objects from Africa, Asia, and all around the world. As a result, although we as a field, the museum field the open knowledge field, the cultural heritage fields have all moved away, as much as possible from that colonial legacy. The fact is that so much of that stuff, so much of that legacy remains in the way that we classify and organize our artifacts, so much of that remains in the ways that we create taxonomy and made it metadata structures now that we're taking those collections online. So that's, that's why I say it's sticky that's why I say that as much as I love this work as much as my colleagues that curationist love this work. There's more to do. There's a lot more to do. Which brings us to who you can see exactly what I was talking about previously, which brings us to this, this fun little joke that one of one of my colleagues always likes to say in our meetings is that yeah it's curationist, but often it's curation ish. And so what might what I mean by that is that in our pursuit of this really important curatorial work. We're also encountering amazing beautiful inspiring alternatives to that that legacy that that Western colonialist legacy. And that is really excited and really inspired us as a team to start to invent this platform which I'm going to get into depth into a little bit later. We saw an incredible amounts of knowledge being held in local level and grassroots organizations all around the world. And so people who really had such an intimate relationship with these objects, and had the historical knowledge behind them to really offer something that we're not seeing an institution to offer a different take on the institutional taxonomic and metadata structures that we're seeing in museums art institutions cultural heritage institutions broadly. So the project for curationist became to really understand okay how can we augment and support this, what I'm calling curation ish work. And there are three things that we can and should do both ourselves at curationist and the open knowledge field in general. And those three things are of course to make images and artifacts widely available. I'm speaking to the Wikimedia community I don't need to tell you guys that you're, you're down you get it. And along with that we also need to grant knowledge holders access to share their information. That means we have a lot of work to do in closing the digital divide. And as cutesy of a name as that is the fact is that if open knowledge and especially digital open knowledge is going to be a force for good in the world. It really really needs to enable internet access profit. And the last thing, which in my mind is the sort of most important hurdle is, is we need to find a way to put local level knowledge on heart with institutional expertise. We need people in their local communities to be able to speak to these large institutions and to be heard by these large institutions, and to be able to do so, both on the level of conceptual knowledge sharing, and also on the level of that metadata also on the level of those taxonomic structures. So towards that ends we at curation and have been developing a platform that is working towards these things and I'm really excited to take you through it more a little bit more in depth. But first I'm going to hand it over to my colleague Neha to take you through a little activity to illustrate exactly what I mean towards that ends. Neha go ahead and say hello and introduce yourself. Hello everyone. I am one of the content editors here at Curationist, where we also produce features and collections on the site for people to see how our tools are being used. I am going to do a sort of visual associative brainstorming game with you to make you aware of how there are gaps in metadata right now so we can do that game. And yeah, the gaps in metadata but there are also resources out there and and although we're going to use Wikimedia Commons as our search bar in order to do this game and all of you will are welcome to participate in this game. So the game board is in the chat. That's where we're going to be working so it's for those of you who don't know it so whiteboard that is run by Google and we all can contribute to it it's super easy. All you have to do is, if you're on another website and you want to copy an image and place it in this game, you, you're able to just do that, do that by copying the image and then pasting it in here. There's no log in needed. The next slide please. So what we're looking at is a cat mummy and cartonage. That's the title of the object as you would see it in the Brooklyn Museums website that leaves you thinking, you know, a variety of associations with it, not the least of which maybe if you don't know the word cartonage means. Next slide please. This is I'm just walking you through how we might work this example. So you might be reading this and it tells you it's a painted plaster coffins and now you might be interested in plaster, maybe interested in painted coffins. There's a diamond shaped pattern you might get interested in how the linen is arranged in that crisscross pattern that it's a wild desert cat you might be interested in that. So this is necessarily in the metadata here. And then it was shown an exhibition called soulful creatures animal mummies and ancient Egypt. So that's kind of exciting there's actually more description on their website but and more images as you can see on the bottom left including their x-ray images. But we're going to move forward to the next. So this sort of cat mummy can lead us as a group, for instance, or any group to research cat figures and jewelry, or look up Egyptian mummy portraits, or we may think of jaguars, aka wild cats and pre-Columbian or Mayan art. What I wanted to point out is I, I'm going to go clockwise from the top left. So the first image is the linen from Tutankhamen's embalming cache. So I only put in the search from linen bandage and the Wikimedia Commons image search and this was one of the images that showed up. So that was pretty easy that kind of puts us in the right neighborhood. So the next one, I, you know, know about all these mummy portraits and I was like, Oh, this cat mummy makes me think of mummy portraits, where these paintings were made and placed on top of these mummies. So that was a useful search term. Next time, instead of doing cartonage, which doesn't really quite give you important links. The definition of cartonage is painted coffin led me to, led me to this painted coffin of Lady Nefair. So good. But then when I started searching for cat jewelry or jewelry depicting cats or anything like that, it was well not impossible I was just getting one thing, and the rest were not useful search. Use useful images are coming up. So I went to the Wikipedia page for Egyptian cats directly and found this image. It's an Egyptian cat amulet. And there are obviously tons, there must be tons of jewelry out in the world that has cats in it but there was no way for me to get there. This is off off topic in some ways right like a cat mummy and cartonage doesn't necessarily need to lead you to cat amulets, but cat mummies exist because Egyptians revered cats. They had cat jewelry and they had tons of cat amulets but there was no way for me to go from cat mummy to Egyptian cat amulet, the way the metadata currently exists. The next, the next one is the bottom left image. I did the search term. I am jaguar, because my cat or pre Colombian wild cat or pre Colombian cat or any such combination did not lead me to what I knew existed out there which are these jaguar sculptures and amulet you know, decorative items that they had in the pre Colombian age. So this is just to set out how this type of thing can go. The next slide shows how we might actually work. If we just started with the cat mummy image next frame please. Our game is to you use Wikimedia Commons for the images. The yellow sticky note tells you that you can copy. I'm going to. Oh, right, I need to be in mine. Hold on. I'm going to catch up to you guys. So the yellow sticky note tells you that you can either copy the image from your search and Wikimedia Commons. Or you can use this tool on the left side, which is to the left of my, my laser pointer, and you can use that to create a sticky note and just put your search term up on the Jamboard. So we're going to basically use another image to do something very similar like this cat mummy I could have searched for just so covered mummy cartonage animal mummies pet burials painted coffin which I did while desert cat cat headdress cat jewelry cat worship which I didn't search but I could have put in linen strips and the linen bandage that's kind of like the search term universe and you can obviously put in either the term or the image. Next slide please. But we're not going to use the cat mummy for the image where instead going to use this image, this work which exists in. I cannot see the bottom. I think it's in the Brooklyn Museum. I'm going to. Could you shrink the or put the text somewhere else. It's at the mat. Okay. And it's a jade item from the early classic Mayan period. I just want us to observe like if you have to like now go and make a few thoughts about this or follow up on this. What could you possibly be looking for. You can notice that the creature is seated. It's cross legged so you can be searching for something cross legged. I'm not going to give up too much about this but if you know about the piece of course you may look for those key search terms. The pose involves the hands like this. If you notice there's a beak. And the face. And then, additionally, if you look at the two eyes it seems like there's a series of receding eyes, but there's something even more novel about the eyes. They seem cross eyed, just like it's cross legged. It's kind of a few key things to give you something to go off of most people think of jade as Chinese and precious jade artifacts. They come from China, but, or at least regular Americans well, but there's also these plastic Maya jades I kind of wanted to put those two together. And our next slide please that is our jam board. So I've shrunk the deity figure and we can search and Wikimedia Commons. Maybe someone can put the link in the chat. For those who may not know how to get there for whatever crazy reason. And, and based on whatever you find or what your search term might be, I would love it if you guys were able to populate this for me. It could simply be a search term or an object. And I know. I know Amanda is going to help me here. I was just typing in the chat, please feel free to jump in this jam board with us, add your images or potential search terms based on this image to this jam board. You shouldn't need a login to be able to access it but if you are having any trouble, go ahead and send me a direct message and I can help you troubleshoot. You should also just be able to copy paste images about needing to save them. But again, if anything seems difficult or unintuitive to you, go ahead and let me know. I'm going to come and add my search term. Thanks everyone for being so active in this jam board. I just get a thrill to see things start to pop up. And what I'm doing is, I'm actually trying to put the image. I'm trying to do some of these searches and find images and I'm putting them right next to them next to the search terms. But if, if you go to, if you were to put that search term in your thing in your browser, you can right click and just copy the image and then paste it directly you don't have to actually download it or anything. So we take, let's say five more minutes to can see I'm thinking of so many things as we play. I'm delighted to see so many things on this jam board that I either would never have thought of, or actually I'm not sure what they are. We'll give it a few more minutes guys. Any final thoughts, right about 60 more seconds for any final thoughts any last search terms or images. Wow. All right, I'm going to do a last call and then Neha I think you're ready to walk us through our results, whenever you're ready. Yeah, give me two seconds I'm putting this text down there. Okay. Great. We've come up with a lot. Going from everything from ancient Mayan Jade artifacts and ancient days to search terms that are about modern Jade figures and animals because clearly this one's not quite human, even if it's anthropomorphized. So we, I, you know, what the, what happened to the Jade mining image to get covered. It's all good. So, let's check that one out and there was like a to this isn't a bright over here. You can see a tiny know which is sort of like the Caribbean Puerto Rican and Cuban like in that area, like an inhaler. So we're in the right neighborhood of where we're looking at, and not even quite the similar thing but I and I could not find anything like our object when I did cross-eyed deity so that kind of gives us a clue of what's missing. We have. I also did the search for, I think it was the Jade artifacts or something and I came up or ancient Jade that was ancient Jade and I came up with this Jade Kong from China, the Neolithic period and that was interesting. When I did Maya Jade artifacts, I got this Maya Jade mask. And as we are able to find and a range of things that we might have more more trouble with what the curationist in some ways is trying to do is not only create the imagery, I mean create access to all this imagery and all these works that exist in the partner archives, but also create a second layer metadata level that may not exist in the original websites to create a possibility for thinking through some of our questions. In some cases it's as simple as writing some colonialist strong in some way, and or by writing the information or by adding information because the metadata has not been supplied because it's an object of low rank in some sense for the museum that's holding hit it, but may not be so from the point of view of the culture from which it was collected. So we're we're working all of those angles and that kind of gives you an idea of how this this board might end up the next slide please. This is just to give you an idea of what the next slide, what slide before it sorry. This tells you what the website actually tells us on the mat. It's an object that's well researched and there's a lot of text on it, but it you know you might be searching. Well after you read this text you might say oh I'm going to look across legged figures, or I'm going to look at look at something where there's an imagery of arms bent in towards the chest and curled in the crab claw position. The deities actually named it's a principle bird deity. And so we don't know if it's actually the bird deity itself, or human wearing that mask, as they do during rituals. That is depicted in this imagery. As I mentioned the figure is cross side. We did not. Nobody caught on to the square pupils part, but they are square so you could have gone searching for that. These kinds of eyes I used to identify shining solar and or the splendid supernatural beings that could have led us to searching for solar beings or you know various solar deities and creating a collection that has to do with solar deities for somebody to come and look at on our website, or somebody's research paper might be on solar deities. How are we on time. We're doing great on time thanks for checking. Oh great. Would we like to do a very quick second jamboard in this case I'm not going to give you very much information at all. And I want to see what happens when we work with that image. So this is a bowl with kufic calligraphy. This is all the information I'm providing it's from the arts of the Islamic world. It's categorized as that in the Berkeley Museum, through the 10th century. And all we know is that it's from the summit period, which doesn't tell us unless you read carefully in the text where it's from. Next slide please and that will be our jamboard. Make this image smaller, please, so we can put other things on there. How's that. Yeah, that's great. Let's go for it. Let's try and come up with Again, everyone is free to hop in this jamboard and let's see what we can turn out for this objects, even though we have so much less metadata originally to work with so again similar to the previous, the previous artifact. Please feel free to jump in and add post it notes with search terms add images that come to your mind. I see we're already thinking Islamic ceramics. And again, that information that we were giving us down here in the bottom right hand corner. Kufic was absolutely going to be my first search term. And we'll give it about, let's say seven minutes. Maybe even a little briefer. Oh no someone put us on the jamboard. We two are search terms each and every one of us. I am going to move that with apologies to its to its creator, a couple more minutes for any final thoughts or images. Excellent about 60 more seconds for any final images search terms, thoughts of any kind. Any last screenshots of the zoom room. Yeah, this is great. So I can see vessels calligraphic vessels but people also want to know about calligraphic tools like how did this thing get drawn on this vessel. That's an interesting thing to think about how was it thrown Islamic ceramics, the Kufic script itself and then we see it being used in the Quran and a couple of examples here. Which might lead us to think oh it's got very flat and tall. Writing style which is correct to sort of squared off script. Summoned art gives us a beautiful vessel but what is summoning so just found the area that it's from over there. So these are great. These are great. Wide rim platters, we could go with that. We could go with shallow bowls. We could go just text on vessels it doesn't have to be Islamic calligraphic calligraphic I really love the spiritual ceramics sticky note that someone put up. You know, you know, is is absolutely something could could be searching for and it's not necessarily here and the metadata and Islamic cookware that could take us in another way like dinnerware. What's the purpose of this writing might take us to like proverbs on on or reminders on our so on our ceramic where so and slip trail painted text amazing great that's so useful in terms of what we can and cannot find from this in terms of the actual image, it would be nice to go to the link, and I'm going to put it in our chat so that here's to everyone in the meeting. So if we can throw that up on our screen to for us to read what it says which tells us what the the inscription says that it is brown painted in brown slip on a white slip ground. So someone who was looking for slip where was doing during it was in the right place. We didn't get to Iran but that's the summit period once you saw the map you would have gotten to that point and start looking up Iran if somebody wanted to be nationalist in their search terms they could go in that direction. The script is actually placed there in Arabic which is great. And it tells us the proverbs are attributed to Imam Ali and where they were published. So there's a lot of information here if we keep scrolling down. It tells us. Not much else the catalog descriptions has large bore bull with flaring sides ceramic transparent colorless glaze brown slip so this is all technical. First half, then it says huge kufik characters form with center reset the interior design outside is plain. But it, the kufik characters is it's where it's left it doesn't say the proverb part you'd actually need to get to the inscriptions part for it to tell you that it's a proverb. Those are sort of some clear quick observations. So if this object hadn't been fully catalogued and inscription hadn't actually been noted, then the description at the very bottom would be the only metadata in a way that we would have to work with. Any, any thoughts that anyone else might have to add to this. Otherwise, I'm done here. I certainly have some. A widely known for is my constantly having thoughts. So, thank you so much Neha for that that wonderful activity which really shows the way that not only are we as humans you know subject to our own biases and our own sort of trains of thoughts when it comes to describing images cataloging images, putting into organization and taxonomy is and metadata. We also you know have all of the legacy behind us of the history of these objects, both the history that we have captured and that we haven't, which is what brings us to first certainly to our metadata storytelling. I'm going to share these slides after the presentation which will include the associated visual brainstorm and for those of you who are even interested in more metadata, a link to our our medium publication on metadata learning and learning. But it also takes it to the original question which is what is curationist, what are we going to do about having so many different systems for metadata tagging, some of which are are living with us sort of the, the choices and non choices of the people living now as well as the legacies of these objects and the the colonialism and the conquer that they went through. Curationist is a platform that's doing our best to ameliorate some of those issues. Access databases from individual institutions like we saw the Met's like we saw the Brooklyn Museum and making them all searchable in one place one platform, but then trying to go a little bit further and making a place for those additional metadata and additional community cultural level knowledge to be helped. So I'd like to take you now briefly through what our platform looks like. We are launching officially in October this year. And then there's a beta open and available to you on at curationist.org, where you can also sign up to be on our newsletter to hear more about the platform ends with front and center that idea about reimagining culture. It's at the heart of everything we do and so towards that end. So I'm going to bring us down quickly here since our time is limited to look at some of our editorial features. This is the place where on our platform we're showcasing not only these open access images, but also the, the information that goes along with that. For example, if we come in here into Marshall goddesses and mythical Queens, we can see so much information so many images that depict mythical Queens but also so much information that was contributed by. And then if I scroll back up quickly, I can also show you what the search looks like so say I read this editorial feature and I think gosh I want to see more pictures of armor. Who wouldn't buy simply come up and type in armor just like on our metadata Jamboard. You can see that we get a bunch of different things this feels like a wildly disparate collection here we get both images of armor, but we're also getting weapons. So if we come in we add let's say women, so we're getting a little bit closer our metadata is becoming clearer, both because of the metadata of our partner institutions that we're drawing from. And because of the curation is sort of streamlining standardization process, we've got women let's also filter by material and say we only want to see bronze goddess statues. So we're getting even closer things are things are shaping up. Let's say I find an image that I'm really intrigued by, I can come in, look at it here. You all the images, read information about the work and see the original inscription that comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From there I'm able certainly of course to add it to a collection. Let's see armor goddess it seems like the right collection to add in. And then if you come to my profile. Hello, this is me. This collection either public or private again allowing people to choose the level at which they contribute their knowledge. So, in our last five minutes here we are back at the curation is homepage to come again when we launched very soon. I'll speak just a couple minutes more about where we're headed even after this. Like I said in the beginning our metadata and our taxonomy is are the ways that we find an access images, but they're also the way that we we make those images, and those artifacts known to other people. The big next step for curation is even after this original platform launches is to think about ways that we're contributing our metadata and the grassroots level community cultural heritage knowledge that we're canvassing for in our editorial features in our fellowship program in our critics program, and be able to contribute it back to this large open access ecosystem. So what we're exploring ways to contribute that metadata back to the wiki data and the wiki media community, as well as back to the home institutions for so many of these objects. We really see that as part of our role as just a good citizen in the open access open knowledge space. So there's so much more to come from curation at. I really hope that you guys were able to get a sense not only of our work, but also how we do it and what is important about it to us. And in our very last five minutes. First of all, let me thank Neha for her amazing thoughtful work on that. Thank you for that interactive activity and let me thank Raven and Steak and Allison my teammates for also being here. And then if you guys have any questions we would love to hear them. I can stick around certainly until our time slot ends to answer any questions or hear what you guys think, or perhaps I'd like to hear from my teammates what sort of metadata, they were putting on our on our activity boards. Thank you everyone that came up with the syrup the spiritual ceramics. Well done. That was amazing. So please remember to follow us on social media as we will be doing more updates as we get closer to their product launch in October. I have shared the information about where to find us on social media. Well, again, thanks to everyone so much for being here. What a joy to get to share so much so many people's hard work with you. There's so much more to come from us. Like I said, please stay tuned. And if you'd like to connect I'm going to go ahead and put my direct email address in the chat. So if you have any questions thoughts ideas or you just want to have another conversation, please don't hesitate to get it. Thank you everyone.