This file hosts materials related to my contribution to PIDapalooza 2021, taking place online for 24h starting at 2.30pm UTC on January 27, 2021. The session proposal was submitted on 6 November 2020.
*Required
Daniel Mietchen
Words and phrases convey meaning and as such are key components of human communication or research about it. Wikidata is an open knowledge graph built around persistent and machine-actionable identifiers for millions of concepts that are organized in a nearly language-independent manner and linked to the words and phrases expressing the corresponding meanings in potentially any human language. It is collaboratively curated by a global multilingual community of over 20 thousand monthly contributors as well as a range of automated tools.
PID Communities International
Wikidata: Persistent identifiers as the basis for multilingual and human-machine collaboration
Bring some words or phrases that you find interesting, in a language that you can type into an etherpad or speak into your computer's microphone. Feel free to sing them too! Then let's explore them together and see how they are related to meanings or to words and phrases in other languages, and at what points in that network of interactions the introduction of persistent identifiers would be beneficial.
The session's etherpad sits at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/zenodo.4253308 . Further materials related to the session shall be available via https://10.5281/zenodo.4253308 when the session starts.
The main part would be in English, with examples drawn from about a dozen other languages, including optionally some spoken or written by people in attendance, not necessarily by me.
How would you run the session to support the spirit of PIDapalooza as a laid-back, welcoming, energetic and exciting, sociable and serious gathering? *
The session would be seeded with a demo by me of how words and phrases, word forms and meanings can be encoded in Wikidata and to what extent this has already been done. We will then use some audience-suggested examples to explore the Wikidata knowledge graph, the interactions between nodes within the graph and with external resources like monolingual databases, as well as the role of identifiers in all of that. Towards the end, there will also be a demo of recording individual words and phrases and of integrating such recordings into the knowledge graph.
We encourage audience participation. This can be done in many ways: Q&A, polling the audience, etc. Please describe which tactics you would use to engage the audience.*
Session participants would be encouraged to contribute - via the etherpad - words or phrases in any language they master, or concepts or identifiers for any of these.
By the time I was about 9, the persistent identifiers I had seen on buses, cars, trams or trains during the last few hours or sometimes days would often get stuck in my head and entertain my thoughts about where the vehicles or their passengers were from, where they were heading and whether there was an interesting pattern in or a meaning behind those character sequences.
At about the same time, I began to learn my first foreign language at school. I did not know anyone who did not speak my mother tongue, so my motivation to learn that new one was limited. One day, the teacher gave me a book in that language and told me I should read it and give a talk about it the following week. I had never read a book in another language, and it took me about two hours to work my way through the wall of text on the first page, so I had no idea whether or how I would make it through that book in a week's time.
- January 27, 2021 15:00 - 18:00 UTC
- January 27, 2021 20:00 UTC - January 28, 00:00 UTC
- January 28, 2021 01:00 - 02:00 UTC
- January 28, 2021 04:00 - 07:00 UTC
- January 28, 2021 08:00 - 11:00 UTC
- January 28, 2021 12:00 - 15:00 UTC
- dm7gn /at/ virginia.edu