Wikidatathon "data and theater" at the Bnu Lab
On December 12, 2024, we held a Wikidatathon on theater data at the Bnu Lab (Strasbourg National Library). The event was organized in collaboration with the Bnu Lab, represented by Elisa Michelet and Arthur Brody, and the Wikimedian in residence at Urfist Strasbourg, Mickaël Schauli; the datathon was also part of his residence.
Workshop content
In the morning, Mickaël Schauli and other organizers presented Wikidata and research projects at the University of Strasbourg, at the Bnu and beyond. In preparation for the automation work to be carried out in the afternoon, Mickaël showed how to manually create Wikidata items for theater plays and for their characters.
In the afternoon, Mickaël showed how to automate the creation of Wikidata items using OpenRefine. Then, we created items for the plays and characters of the Thealtres project; the data had been created within the project via manual transcription and annotation of plays’ bibliographic metadata and character lists. The plays are 19th-century and early 20th-century plays from popular subgenres in Alsatian, French and German (the vaudeville, the Posse and Schwank …).
For play items, we worked on the following properties:
- P31 (instance of)
- P407 (language of work or name)
- P1476 (title)
- P50 (author)
- P953 (full work available at)
- P674 (characters)
For character items, we worked on the following properties:
Results
Besides the Wikidata items created (170 items created, 180 items modified, plus 565 references, by 7 contributors), Arthur Brody from Bnu developed an interface that queries Wikidata’s SPARQL endpoint to retrieve the last plays and the last characters created in Wikidata.
The interface is available at https://dev-lab-one.vercel.app/wikidata.
The last images below that show the interface and the way it looked at the end of the datathon, with the characters and plays we created.
Challenges
One challenge was how to model group characters, e.g. groups of unnamed charactes at the end of a play’s character list. A possibility here is to create an item of type group of fictional humans (Q125919847).
Outlook
Besides continuing importing the project data into Wikidata, future work ideas proposed by participants included a Wiktionary datathon with material related to the project.
