Continuing this thread with a reportback of Monday 14 Feb's GLAM meetings
with Liam in Mumbai.
1)Our first meeting was with the Heras
Institute<http://www.xaviers.edu/heras.htm>at St Xavier's College.
Founded in 1926 as the Indian Historical Research Institute by Fr. Henry
Heras S. J., the Heras Institute promotes historical and cultural research
in India, fosters study and research in Indian history and archaeology,
Indian art and literature, Indian religions and Indian culture, trains
scholars and professors in research methodologies and the re-construction of
history, and provides guidance and facilities needed for such Historical
Research and Investigation.
Given their research/culture orientation, they would be ideal to collaborate
with - but they were somewhat sceptical of the benefits of collaborating
with wikipedia (which they have warned their students against referring to).
However, they were interested in receiving documentation of other GLAM work
that Liam or others may have initiated - this is to be the next step. Also,
any collaboration can only take place with the college principal's assent.
Liam and I felt it would need lots of convincing for this to happen, so
maybe we should start with more interested GLAM institutions in Mumbai (eg
Prince of Wales Museum or CSMVS, which Pradeep has already reported on).
Wikimedian Vivek Cherian expressed his inability to join us at this meeting
since he was ill.
2)Our second meeting yesterday was hosted at and by
Volte<http://www.volte.in/>,
a contemporary art gallery - and comprised an informal discussion with
curators, gallerists and art historians from the following contemporary art
institutions: Independent Curators
International<http://www.ici-exhibitions.org/>g/>,
Gallery Chemould <http://www.gallerychemould.com>, Jehangir Nicholson Art
Foundation <http://www.jnaf.org/> which is the contemporary art wing of The
Museum (CSMVS), Lakeeren
<http://www.lakeerengallery.com/Profile.aspx>,
CAMP<http://camputer.org/>and
pad.ma
UserAroundThe Globe participated at this meeting.
We discussed the status of Indian contemporary art on wikipedia (poor),
possibilities for improving collaboratively through partnerships as proposed
with CSMVS for ancient art (high), and the barrier of self-promotion since
most contemporary art in India is in the hands of private galleries. There
was definite interest: one proposal is to do a daylong workshop to infuse
some Indian content into the page "Contemporary art" on wikipedia - this
would also minimize promotion of specific artists.
There was a long discussion on images - and how to populate pages on Indian
contemporary artists on wikipedia with images. For example, the very
wellknown modern artists (eg MF Husain) and contemporary artists (Subodh
Gupta, Bharati Kher, Jitish Kallat, Reena Kallat) all have pages on
wikipedia - but no images of the art they create. From a user's perspective,
seeing this art is an important visual experience for which they must leave
wikipedia.
Galleries were willing to contribute images to populate these pages - but
the issue is licencing. They are not sure who owns the copyright to the
photo of the artist's work: the gallery? the artist? The Jehangir Nicholson
Art Foundation is actively considering putting 800 works on an online
platform and is leaning towards a creative commons 'non-commercial' licence
- they are open to discussing the need for CC-BY-SA if they contribute this
to wikimedia commons.
Outcome of this was also an interest by both the Jehangir Nicholson Art
Foundation and Volte, the host gallery, in convening a workshop on copyright
- for wikimedians, artists, art foundations etc - since there are many
confusions around image copyright, specially when we come down from the
abstract principle to the concrete case.
In conclusion, all of us would like to thank Liam Wyatt for his visit to
Mumbai - which was stimulating, productive, and fun...and which has opened
many new doors. Since Ashwin from Pune and Anirudh from Ahmedabad also
participated in the Mumbai meetup, the benefits of his visit have spread
wider - Kolkata also got a small taste of GLAM with a hurried 15-minute
skype presentation by Liam to the meetup at IIFT on Sat 12 Feb.
Cheers
Bishakha
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Pradeep Mohandas <
pradeep.mohandas(a)gmail.com> wrote:
hi,
Thanks Arun for posting it here. I was really tired when I posted this
yesterday to the Mumbai mailing list. It does seem more or less accurate. A
few additions from what I missed out yesterday night.
1. With The Museum ( Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay -
CSMVS), we spoke with the Museum Director, Chief Art Conservator and the
Business Development Executive there. After the requisite background that
Liam provided (it also helped perhaps that the British Museum Director, Neil
MacGregor visited the Museum this week) that we gave them a rough idea of
possible activities we could do together. We also explained to the
Conservator how a typical session would be conducted to help them understand
their part of the responsibilities and what will be ours.
2. At Jnanapravaha, Bishaka and Liam visited. After the usual pitch, the
feedback was that they were interested in getting students to write and
improve articles on Indian art and aesthetics on Wikipedia. They have asked
for help previous to the next semester in July on how such a thing can be
organised.
3. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like
Maharashtra Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get
the money after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and
have trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would
mainly be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on
where to begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the
National Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even docketed (I
forget the original word - something to do with giving the books numbers and
classifying appropriately). We agreed that Libraries and Archives also
suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old
French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word - mine!) and got help from
Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource.
4. Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be
simultaneously done in various languages locally. So, during a Backstage
Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (say)
articles at once. Editors in any language are welcome to contribute.
5. There have been an influx of new people and requests from people for a
basic editing session. Perhaps it is time to interlace the meetups with
WikiAcademy.
With that, I hope I've more or less covered all Wikipedia territory from
the meetup. If I missed out on anything, feel very free to jump in and add
your notes.
warm regards,
Pradeep
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