Wikidata:WikiProject Digital and Performative Arts
Goals[edit]
Long term goals[edit]
- Organize data related to digital art archiving and preservation
Short term goals[edit]
- Gather information about requirements from different institutional and individual stakeholders
- 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[edit]
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 digital and performative artworks 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 Heritage primarily discuss traditional forms of art, such as paintings. The requirements of describing and preserving born-digital artworks are very different from the requirements of describing traditional forms of art, therefore this page aims to address the specificity of the creation and continued development of and/or care for these artworks and the conditions required for the execution and performance of the artworks.
The scope of this Project Page is limited primarily to born-digital and software-based art, rather than just any form of performative or time-based art, although many of the requirements of born-digital artworks will be relevant to the larger field of time-based media. Other common expressions of time-based media art, such as video art for example, may require separate Project Pages. The primary meaning of performative here is understood as the interactions (of machinic components executing scripts, for example, or of users browsing an internet artwork) necessary to be performed in order to run and make meaning of a born-digital artwork, as opposed to the traditional sense of a performance piece where an artist performs for an audience (although that meaning of performance may also be relevant to a digital artwork in some cases).
Use Cases[edit]
Born-digital artworks are not single digital objects, but rather assemblages, dependent on specific software/hardware environments to be executed and rendered. They oftentimes change over time and require specific user input in order to be performed. These characteristics pose multiple challenges to traditional content management, archival and preservation repository systems currently in use in museums and other institutions. As more and more art institutions and cultural organisations include born-digital art in their collections, the need for robust methods of description and preservation documentation will only increase.
Rhizome (Q7320757) is a born-digital arts organisation with a long history in preserving net art. The digital preservation team there have been experimenting with different systems to accommodate their archive of net art (the ArtBase), dating back to the late 90s and including over 2000 artworks to date. They are piloting the use of Wikibase (Q16354758) for collection management and archival description, due to the numerous benefits of using open-source software which facilitates relatively easy creation, management and querying of a linked data database. Furthermore, the federation of Rhizome’s Wikibase with other Wikibase instances, as well as Wikidata’s role as a central hub, allows for the reduction of complexity within the data model any single institution needs to maintain.
This Project Page aims to link Rhizome’s pilot case study with existing research and development work going on in other organisations exploring the use cases of linked data for digital art description and preservation.
Data structure[edit]
The data structure(s) discussed on this Project Page takes as a primary case study the description of digital artworks in Rhizome's independent Wikibase installation. It is meant to be a departing point for a discussion, not a final data model. Many properties used in Rhizome's Wikibase do not yet exist in Wikidata, but if other institutions and organisations feel such properties would be useful for their archives and collections, we could propose their addition to Wikidata.
Additional properties and qualifiers discussed here should broadly relate to the notion of defining an artwork's provenance. Provenance is understood here in its post-modern archival science meaning as context. This can be interpreted in a broad sense, but the aim is to focus the discussion on representing bibliographic data as well as art historical and social context around artworks. Once this initial framework is established, further frameworks pertaining to an artwork's technical dependencies will be discussed either on a sub-page here or, if deemed more appropriate, in other WikiProject pages, such as Wikidata:WikiProject Informatics for instance.
The provenance model explored in this proposal is also partly based on the W3C PROV standard and the proposed implementation is discussed in more detail in a research paper presented at iPRES 2019. The paper is accessible here: https://ipres2019.org/static/pdf/iPres2019_paper_118.pdf
Bibliography[edit]
- Cobb, J. (2015) The Journey to Linked Open Data: The Getty Vocabularies. Journal of Library Metadata, 15 (3-4), pp. 142–156, DOI: 10.1080/19386389.2015.1103081.
- Cook, T. (2001) Archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts. Archival Science, 1 (1), pp. 3-24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435636
- Dekker, A. (2014) Enabling the Future, or How to Survive FOREVER: A study of networks, processes and ambiguity in net art and the need for an expanded practice of conservation. PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London.
- Mayer, A. (2015) Linked Open Data and its Implications for Artistic and Cultural Resources. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 34 (1), pp. 2–14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/680561
- Oldman, D., Doerr, M. and Gradmann, S. (2015) Zen and the Art of Linked Data, in A New Companion to Digital Humanities (eds S. Schreibman, R. Siemens and J. Unsworth). doi:10.1002/9781118680605.ch18
- Thornton, K., Cochrane, E., Ledoux, T., Caron, B. and Wilson, C. (2017) Modeling the Domain of Digital Preservation in Wikidata, in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Digital Preservation iPRES 2017, Kyoto, Japan, September 25–29. Available from: https://ipres2017.jp/wp-content/uploads/7.pdf
Participants[edit]
The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:{{Ping project|Digital and Performative Arts}}
- Loz.ross (talk) 16:45, 11 July 2018 (UTC)
- LaynaWhite (talk) 23:27, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
- Infopetal (talk) 19:41, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
- Megs (talk) 14:25, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
- Zblace (talk) 10:12, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
- Hannolans (talk) 16:14, 19 September 2022 (UTC)
- Norma De Saint Picman (talk)
- SAPA bdc (talk) 06:21, 18 August 2023 (UTC)