Commons Voices: contributing life histories to the open knowledge ecosystem in Brazil
The Museu da Pessoa is a Brazilian digital cultural institution that has been collecting life stories in a participatory manner since 1991. The museum’s proposal is to transform the life story of each and every person into human heritage, as a means of knowledge and connection between people, groups and communities. In this text, we will expose the challenges and first results of bringing these “Commons Voices” to the ecosystem of free knowledge, in the context of the GLAM-Wiki initiative of the Museu da Pessoa, started in April 2021.
The museum’s director, historian Karen Worcman, said in a recent talk in the context of the partnership that “the Museu da Pessoa has in its DNA something close to the Wikimedia Movement: we have made the museum’s productive chain, which involves collections, curators, visitors, in a collaborative process. It’s about building a collaborative curation and being open to any visitor.” The talk took place at the Transbordados event, in which digital collections and knowledge organization in Latin America were discussed, with a public presentation of the GLAM-Wiki initiative.
A cultural partnership, in the understanding of Wiki Movimento Brasil, involves four stages, not necessarily consecutive: the public ratification of the partnership, an assessment of the legal infrastructure, an evaluation and mass upload, and the dissemination of knowledge. Here, we will talk about how these steps occurred or are planned to happen in the case of the Museu da Pessoa.
Public ratification of the partnership
The first step in this partnership was the ratification of the Museu da Pessoa’s GLAM-Wiki initiative in April 2021 with a public note of partnership, available on Wikimedia Commons. In it, we signed our intention to collaborate in making the collection available on Wikimedia platforms, associated with carrying out activities for its dissemination.
Next, we started the VRT verification process (formerly OTRS), with the issuance of a specific ticket to Museu da Pessoa. In this process, the Museu da Pessoa itself requested via e-mail a VRT volunteer body to validate the partnership’s permission under the terms described in the Wikimedia Commons license. The verification certifies that the collection made available on Wikimedia platforms was provided in fact by the Museu da Pessoa itself, and not by third parties outside the context of the partnership, which offers legal certainty for the use of the collection items under the terms indicated on their respective pages.
Still in the process of preparing the on-wiki structure for this GLAM, WMB created a page with the tGLAM template for the Museu da Pessoa, in which we publicly centralized the documentation and activities of the partnership, with an open invitation to the community to also participate in its activities. In addition to having a function of organizing the stages of GLAM, the page also serves as a community portal, where you can follow the progress of uploads and associated activities and get involved with them. The idea is for the page to develop and grow as the collection is made available.
For control, we’ve created a Wikidata item for the Museu da Pessoa’s GLAM, to be added to all collection items on Wikidata, and a control category on Wikimedia Commons. For tracking statistics on uploads, the Museu da Pessoa was inserted into the GLAM Wiki Dashboard, a platform developed by Wikimedia Israel that allows quick views of data about GLAMs, such as number of views and usages of items on Wikimedia platforms, for example.
In early 2021, Wiki Movimento Brasil developed a tutorial for GLAMs in Portuguese detailing the steps mentioned above. We especially recommend it to other institutions that want to understand how to start a GLAM in practice.
Assessment of legal infrastructure
The assessment stage of the legal infrastructure usually occurs at the beginning of the partnership and it is essential for both the cultural institution and the Wikimedia community and third parties to have the guarantee that the material to be made available is compatible with free licenses, without copyright infringement.
For 30 years, the Museu da Pessoa has received life stories in different media formats. Even in the 1990s, the museum published stories they received via email from collaborators. Today, the museum’s website offers a platform that allows the submission of text and multimedia narratives. The Museu da Pessoa also carries out oral memory collection projects, in connection with local communities. This long trajectory accompanied the evolution of web 2.0 itself, which meant that the issue of licensing of people’s narratives was not standardized since the beginning of the collective construction of the collection. Therefore, during the assessment of the legal infrastructure, it was necessary to understand the varied uses of licenses in different types of media, in addition to the website license itself.
The evaluation was carried out in dialogue with the Museu da Pessoa team, people linked to Creative Commons Brasil and open knowledge activists. Based on this analysis, we now have the legal certainty to upload texts from the collection. The upload of media will depend on a more detailed evaluation, in progress.
Evaluation and mass upload
With the assurance that the items in the collection are compatible with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, we started the stage of evaluation and mass upload of the museum’s textual collection.
An inherent challenge of this partnership is understanding how to model life stories on Wikidata, the semantic web database of Wikimedia projects. As Karen Worcman commented during the Transbordados event, “a person’s life story is not what happened to them, but what they narrate about themself.” Oral memory poses ontological challenges to be tackled by the GLAM Wiki partnership. For now, the direct linking of the textual narrative with the item of the respective person biographed in the museum’s collection serves as a first step in this direction.
For this, two new properties were created for the Museu da Pessoa on Wikidata: Museu da Pessoa history (P10032) and Museu da Pessoa person ID (P10023), with approval from the Wikidata community. The first links to a Wikimedia Commons archive of a story in the Museum of the Person about or by the subject of this item, while the second serves as a unique identifier of a person on the Museu da Pessoa website.
Both the texts of the narratives and their respective metadata were extracted directly from the Museu da Pessoa website. There are 11,597 files in PDF format. The upload of these documents is usually done via Pattypan, but as the tool was down at the time, it was necessary to adapt the Pywikibot resource to carry out the task. The metadata batch upload was done using the QuickStatements tool. The tools mentioned are free technologies.
The upload can be checked at the partnership’s tGLAM page. The thousands of life stories, once entered into Wikidata, allow for interesting visualizations generated by the Wikidata Query Service.
Dissemination of knowledge
As important as the technical steps is the planning for the dissemination of the collection made available on Wikimedia platforms, as this is where people can access and share its knowledge. One of the possible strategies is the creation or improvement of Wikipedia entries associated with the institution’s collection, with links for multimedia files. The case of Museu da Pessoa is quite particular in an approach like this, as it challenges how knowledge itself is understood by the definitions of the encyclopedia.
The work of the Museu da Pessoa has been sustained for thirty years under the premise that everyone’s history is relevant to the construction of a collaborative social memory and that, consequently, everyone has the right to perpetuate their own history to make it a source of knowledge and connection. Wikipedia proposes to make freely available the sum of all human knowledge, which at first glance might seem compatible with the Museu da Pessoa’s motivation. However, Wikipedia has sustained itself, also collaboratively, over the last twenty years by establishing basic editorial guidelines, such as the creation of notability criteria that define what is relevant or not for the project and the referencing and verification in reliable sources of the information added to entries. At first, ordinary people are not guaranteed their space on Wikipedia, unless they have performed some outstanding feat and such an act has been documented in reliable sources, usually textual, such as academic and journalistic articles. From the moment the Museu da Pessoa, as an institution responsible for safeguarding a social memory, accepts contributions from people speaking about themselves or third parties, we enter into a discussion about how the traditional documentation models that sustain Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects more generally do not account for the complexity and diversity of human knowledge integrated in our lives, putting in check what is, in fact, the “sum of all human knowledge”.
Some personalities who had their lives narrated in the Museu da Pessoa are notable enough to be on Wikipedia in Portuguese, as you can see in the query preview below. Of the more than 11,000 reports, 324 already have entries, and of these, 146 also have images on Wikimedia Commons:
The museum’s collection tells fantastic stories of common people, such as Pequenita, the only resident of her hometown which was flooded in the context of the construction of the Sobradinho Dam. Pequenita, whose story was recorded by the Museu da Pessoa in 2007, recently received an entry on Wikipedia in Portuguese, based on that work. We intend to organize edit-a-thons with the Museu da Pessoa in 2022 to work on biographical entries and other general content related to the museum’s collection and practices. It is also on our horizon to explore the potential of sharing the museum’s multimedia files, in order to spread other forms of knowledge expression beyond the textual format.
The addition of the Museu da Pessoa collection on Wikimedia platforms and its dissemination activities are part of a low-cost participatory methodology with high potential impact that Karen Worcman calls social memory technology. During the Transbordados event, she explains: “Our social memory technology is based on this relationship between the individual, which is the personal memory; with us, which is our collective memory of groups such as families, communities, territories and countries; and our relationship to the construction of knowledge for the rest of society. It is based on the tripod of building, organizing and socializing stories: it’s no use just listening and telling life stories if we don’t make them the heritage of a museum and if we don’t socialize them back to the public.”
Text: Érica Azzellini & João Alexandre Peschanski
Images: Éder Porto & Lucas Belo
