https://vimeo.com/872875780

https://vimeo.com/873705622

Traditional Knowledge labels (TK Labels) are an initiative for Indigenous communities and local organizations that allows them to express conditions for sharing their materials and engage in research in ways that respect community rules, governance and protocols for using, sharing and circulating knowledge and data.

The set of tools for communities includes additionally Biocultural (BC) Labels that are used to define expectations about appropriate use of biocultural collections and data.

The Notices are tools for institutions and researchers to identify Indigenous collections and data and recognize Indigenous rights and interests.

How can these labels be used on Wikimedia Commons? How would adding them be administered? Who can add a label? How is adding them managed in practice?

Corrie Roe from Local Contexts can join the discussion on Friday at 15:00 or 16:00 CEST.

Result presentation

https://vimeo.com/874712104

Challenge

As part of the MEG's upcoming temporary exhibition, 'Memories. Geneva in the Colonial World', the interpretation team and Ivonne Gonzales, has designed a physical participative installation on the topic of slavery. The installation’s aim is to encourage the visitors to move beyond a solely intellectual (and thus distant) understanding of the transatlantic trade and its devasting consequences. Instead, the installation will ask the public to position themselves emotionally and intellectually vis-à-vis this tragic chapter of our common history.

We now need your help to carry out its digital creation.

You're also more then welcome to contribute with feedback on the physical installation!

CONTEXT:

The physical hands-on interactive installation will be situated in the physical exhibition’s section on the transatlantic trade and Geneva’s links to it, next to a mural designed by Kalonji (Genevan artist) which emphasises the fact that slavery is a chapter of our common history.A digital platform is being developed along the exhibition, which will mirror the exhibition. It is important for us that the analogue hands-on installation on slavery has a digital pendant. That would enable us to collect data on how the audiences relate to and position themselves regarding this history. It will also enable those who don’t have access to the physical exhibition to participate.

EXPLAINATIONS

The physical version of the installation will work as follow:

Visitors will have to pick a pre-cut thread from five boxes. Each box contains threads of a specific colour and corresponds to one of the following affirmations: My ancestors were enslaved My ancestors participated or benefited directly or indirectly from slavery I am not directly concerned by slavery My country benefited directly or indirectly from slavery I don't know what my links to slavery are

Then, the visitor faces an oval mural on which 15 words are written. In very close proximity (immediately above or under or next to) each word there’s a nail. The visitor is invited to tie their thread around the different nails that correspond to the words or word they most identify with. The words are as follow:

1. Ignorance
2. Anger
3. Hatred / Rage
4. Impotence
5. Disgust
6. Humiliation
7. Shame
8. Suffering
9. Courage
10. Empathy
11. Indifference
12. Discomfort
13. To know more
14. Solidarity
15. Need for reparation

OPTIONS: Justice / Activism

The idea is therefore that each person creates a ‘path of resonance’ on the tapestry that maps the collective relationship ‘we’ have with the transatlantic slave trade.

A few things to keep in mind:

The tapestry must remain oval-shaped. As data/paths accumulate, it is important that the categories remain visible/readable. The categories may change and evolve - so the digital installation must be easy for the museum team to update!

INSPIRATION

TECH PLAN

https://vimeo.com/873684702

Project by Sandra Becker, MEG

https://vimeo.com/872920469

Challenge

GOAL: Decolonising the MEG's inventories through research and analysis of semantic violence : create a programme to tag MEG inventories and identify racist and discriminative terms or problematic provenance indications.

DATASETS: https://opendata.swiss/dataset/metadata-meg-collections

CONTEXT: MEG offers online consultation of the 70,000 objects in its collections, using inventory sheets supplemented by one or more photographs of each item, a "cartel" or "list" description and links to the various digitised old inventory registers.

Far from being neutral and objective, metadata has inherited the information contained in the inventories that preceded it, and is always historically situated.

An OCR scan of the MEG inventory registers, which were drawn up between 1901 and 1993, can be used to search by keyword for colonial, racist or disrespectful terms, or indications of an acquisition context that is ethically reprehensible today.

The aim of this challenge is to create a programme to search and tag the MEG's metadata for discriminatory, racist and violent semantic traces in the description of its collections:

• relating to the denomination or invisibilisation of the identity of their creators, the people depicted on the artworks and the cultural owners
• relating to the description and supposed use of the object
• relating to provenance, i.e. more precisely to the acquisition process (theft, looting, confiscation, unfair trade during colonial era).

As part of its commitment to transparency, the museum also has a duty to warn and guide users of its historical data so that they are not confronted with violent and racist terms without contextual warning.

The idea is that the disclaimers/tags appear on the online database of the MEG: https://www.ville-ge.ch/meg/sql/musinfo00.php

METHOD: -Create a thesorus of colonial, racist, problematic terms to be search in the database and OCR scan -Build a disclaimer system which could respond to different cases of semantic violences -Create a programm capable of producing a "decolonial" analysis of the ethically reprehensible information contained in the MEG database

CONTACT: Floriane Morin

Propositions:

Slack: https://glamhackchworkspace.slack.com/archives/C05UQSGFX4H

Challenge

Zentralbibliothek Zürich provides a text corpus of printed travelogues from the 16th to 19th century. Can you identify and extract colonial traces in these French and German texts? For instance, you could try describe the gaze on the "other" by tracking down mentions of geographic regions, different languages, certain ethnicities or one of the following semantic fields with NLP methods:

• the concept of the "noble savage"
• slavery
• representation of dominance
• hierarchies and structures of control

For instance, the last field could be looked at from an economic, military, cultural or political perspective. Starting from a military perspective, word clusters like "Truppe – Fortifikation – Kriegszug - verfolgt – Beute – Treueeid – schwören – Vasall – kniend - Tribut" could be interesting to search for inside the German texts.

Postcolonial reading of travelogue data

What perspectives on colonialism can be gained by the extracted entities, that are normally not considered in travel narratives?

Listing names of persons

- Shift the focus away from the positioning and the role of the author in the colonial project

- Undertake a schematic grouping: Identify intermediaries\, rand-and-file employees or marginalized voices

Listing the names of organisations

- Map the colonial infrastructure in an arena

Listing the names of historical places

- Compare the different naming for places in time

Process

We used the SBB-NER-Tagger, developed by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), for Named Entity Recognition in the travelogues. We were able to extract person, organization and place entities from the OCR texts. The SBB-NER-Tagger contains a BERT-based model which has been trained on the SBB collections of early modern prints in German, French and English language, and (at first sight) seems to produce some decent results.

We created one JSON file per text page, starting from the original JSON file of the dataset, and enhancing each page object with the identified entity strings and types (person, place, organization).

Result

We have a prototypical frontend displaying the entities present per book page: https://luminous-speculoos-e2e07f.netlify.app/

For a reference of the entity categories used, please see the BERT documentation.

A possible next step would be to use the Named Entity Linking Tool SBB-NED from SBB to link the entities found in the texts to Wikidata objects.

https://vimeo.com/873249326

With the Charles A. Drenowatz Collection, which it received as a gift in 1979, the Museum Rietberg owns one of the most important collections of Chinese painting from the 15th to 19th centuries, the Ming and Qing periods, in Europe. The collection is known worldwide and has a great reputation in art history. Thanks to a grant from the Federal Office of Culture, the museum has undertaken a project that takes an in-depth look at the collector Charles A. Drenowatz (1908-1979), who acquired his paintings in the 1950s-1960s, as well as the history of the works' transmission and the networks through which Drenowatz was able to assemble the collection.

Painting occupies a very special place in the Chinese art canon. Works by famous artists found their way into the palace collections of the imperial family as well as into the important private collections of members of the upper class. What is unique about Chinese painting is that often not only the artist put an inscription and his seal on the painting, but also the recipient of the painting, friends and acquaintances of the artist, but also later owners, famous art critics and other expert viewers. In the course of time, these additions became a fixed but continuously expanding component of the work of art. At the same time, they are extremely important documentary sources, which makes Chinese painting an ideal subject for provenance research.

Over the course of this project the information was gathered in the museums database. For each painting the seals, stamps (in this project referred as "Provenienzmerkmal" or "PM") and inscriptions were analysed, transcribed where possible and connected to the people who were the owner of those seals. This created a dense network of people, artworks and provenances that are documented in the database. Be aware, that these provenances are not by any means complete, or are following the traditional western idea of provenance as ownership. As written above, seal might have been added by connaisseurs who didn't own the painting. Nevertheless these clues give us an idea on the biography of the painting.

The data will be delivered in four different .json files and a .zip archive with the fotos. Here you can download the data: https://data.stadt-zuerich.ch/dataset/mrz\_drenowatz\_sammlung Apologies beforehand for the qualities of the images - and since a lot of the paintings are on long rolls with multiple scenes, fotos have been taken of the seperate scenes. There might be gaps, or it might be possible to stitch them togehter in one complete image.

How can this dense information be shown in an interactive way?

https://vimeo.com/873253026

In the archives of the City of Geneva, there are a lot of letters from the MEG or to the MEG which include information about MEG Objects. Most of these letters have been digitized. By linking the objects to the corresponding letters, the information about the provenance of the objects could be improved.

Datasets

• Metadata of Musée d'Ethnographie de Genève (MEG) collections
• Index général de la correspondance du Musée d'Ethnographie (1900-1952). The letters themselves will be available during the hackathon, but they are not openly licensed

Idea on How to proceed

For this object https://www.ville-ge.ch/meg/sql/musinfo_public.php?id=040434

There is a mention of J. Debarge in the field "Collection particulière".

In the index of letters, there are a couple of letters from Josette Debarge originating from Cameroun in ~1931

Here is a letter about this object.

But the letter is sent to Mosé Yéyap which is mentioned in the old inventory https://www.ville-ge.ch/meg/musimages/registres/Registres_tapuscrits/40434.pdf

Challenges

• The names are not written in the same way (see above : J. Debarge in the MEG Metadata and DEBARGE, Josette, Dr in the index of the letters
• There are a lot of letters, so it is not easy to guess which one has relevant information (maybe the date of the letter and the date of the entry of the object in the collection could help)

Possible Outputs

• A small website which could display the objects and the relevant letters (and link them). Maybe with some additional information about the persons who wrote the letters
• A data table with the possible links
• An extraction of the letters which have information about objects
• ...

The first inventories of the collection of MEG are old handwritten inventory books. These books contain some very important information regarding the objects and their provenance. Not only do they inform about the date at which the object was collected or about the name of the person who collected it. They also provide sometimes some very useful contextualizing information about the biography of the object. Plus, they show how the objects were used by European institutions to produce colonial knowledge on colonized people and their material heritage.

The information provided by these documents hasn’t always been transferred to the digital database. Thus, curators and researchers spend a lot of time searching the old inventories to potentially find some more information on the objects they’re working on. Such a program would be really helpful for all (provenance) research to be done in the future on the MEG objects.

Traces of colonial knowledge production

The City of Geneva's ethnography collection was brought together in 1901 in a single exhibition site, which became the Musée d'ethnographie. The collection is made up of several collections from different public and private museums, including the Musée des missions and the Musée archéologique. These collections are described in original handwritten inventories, with specific numbering. When the Musée d'ethnographie was created, a new inventory grouping together the various collections was handwritten until 1973. Between 1973 and 1993, the continuation of this register was typed. At the same time, to facilitate consultation and protect the handwritten registers, the entire MEG inventory register (1901-1971) was also typed. The paper registers were subsequently replaced by computerised systems.

Example:

The inventory entry of the object ETHAF 034815, Victory at the Battle of Adwa (1896) is linked with two inventory book (see bottom of the inventory page).

The first inventory Copie dactylographiée en 13 volumes de l'Inventaire original MEG manuscrit (which is a typed copy of the other one) was digitized with an OCR system. So, in this case, it was possible to link the exact page of the inventory related to this object.

When you click on the link, you access the corresponding inventory entry:

The handwritten inventories however wasn't yet digitized with an OCR system. Thus, the link leads to the whole handwritten inventory book.

Instead of leading to the whole inventory book, we'd like the link to lead to the corresponding page of the inventory:

The idea of this challenge would thus be

• to create a program to read and transcribe the handwritten MEG inventories
• to link the page containing an inventory entry with the corresponding object page in the museum database.

One problem case to be faced during the challenge: The inventory sheet of the number 025988 extends overs five pages of the register. (See inventory book number 11, page 12.

https://vimeo.com/873305066

In 2013, archaeologists from the University of Basel conducting excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings unearthed a limestone tile (a so-called ostracon). Initially unremarkable, this piece of rock revealed its historical significance as one of the world's oldest sundials, dating back to the 13th century BC. The sundial features a central hole for a gnomon (a rod made of wood, bronze or lead) allowing it to cast a shadow, and fan-shaped lines rendered in black pigments onto the limestone surface.

"Ra" was developed to bring this 3200 year old artifact to life. The project showcases the sundial's functionality, as a shadow moves across its surface to indicate the time. Numerals from 6 AM to 6 PM denote the hours. View (simulation, ostracon front, ostracon back), shadow and dial (original, equinox, winter solstice, summer solstice, today, today Luxor true solar) as well as the numerals (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, eastern Arabic, Arabic) can be toggled by means of hieroglyph buttons. The astronomical modes have been calculated for a latitude of 25.5° (Luxor).

Launch Ra, the world's oldest sundial!

Team

• Thomas Weibel
• Sophie Aellen
• Hugo Dupraz

Sources

• SRF: Basler Forscher finden altägyptische Sonnenuhr
• Susanne Bickel, Rita Gautschy (2014): Eine ramessidische Sonnenuhr im Tal der Könige, S. 3ff.

Logo, Media

• Wikimedia Commons: The Eye of Ra
• Wikimedia Commons: Ancient Egyptian sundial
• Myriam Frisano: Fourteen Dreams (brush lettering font)
• Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Credits

• Photos: Matjaz Kacicnik, University of Basel, Department of Ancient Civilizations, Kings' Valley Project

https://vimeo.com/872600339

Challenge

DATASETS: Database derived from the report “Temps, espaces et histoires; Monuments et héritage raciste et colonial dans l’espace public genevois : état des lieux historique” by Mohamed Mahmoud Mohamedou et Davide Rodogno

EXPLICATION: The idea is to create an application to visualize the "Time, Space, History" report in map form in order to make its content accessible to a wider audience. The aim of this project is to enable the residents of Geneva to re-consider the city's urban space from the perspective of its colonial and racist heritage. This application is an essential tool for making the data in the report accessible to people who are unfamiliar with this theme in urban space.

The challenge is to make the data attractive and arouse the public's curiosity and desire to consult it. Visuals, illustrations and user-friendliness are central to the success of this application.

Each monument or street mentioned in the report would be represented by a dot on the map of Geneva. It would then be possible to zoom in on the map to discover a particular area. When you click on a monument or street name, a historical note opens with the text of the report and historical information.

In the report, the monuments are classified according to different keywords. It would be possible to reflect these categories using a colour code on the map, or to allow monuments to be 'sorted' by keyword.

We'd like to add images of the different locations to the historical notices. We could perhaps use Wikipedia/Wikimedia images for that.

This map will be shown on a touch station in the central area of the next temporary exhibition at MEG "Remembering. Geneva in the colonial world" (03.05.2024-01.05.2025). The map would also be accessible online on the colonialgeneva.ch digital platform (the digital version of the physical exhibition) and on the City of Geneva project website "Monuments and racist heritage in public areas" (www.geneve.ch/heritage-raciste)

INSPIRATION: The website “bern-kolonial”: https://bern-kolonial.ch/wilkommen

SOURCES: Mohamed Mahmoud Mohamedou et Davide Rodogno Temps, espaces et histoires Monuments et héritage raciste et colonial dans l’espace public genevois : état des lieux historique

CONTACT: Marina Berazategui (MEG)

Click here to access the report in pdf format

Click here to access the report in word format

Click here to access the excel database extracted from the report

Monuments et héritage raciste dans l’espace public : www.geneve.ch/heritage-raciste

Slack: https://glamhackchworkspace.slack.com/archives/C05UQRXD5FT

https://vimeo.com/873323770

Photo credits: lequipe-visuelle.ch

https://vimeo.com/872960147

• Documentation (Google Doc)
• Visualizing Collections (PDF)
• Challenge presentation

Contact: Alice Hertzog - hertzog@vmz.uzh.ch

During his fieldwork in Vanuatu (1910-1912), the ethnologist Felix Speiser (1880-1949) was using different formats of notebooks to collect data. After returning to Basel, he spent years to manage this data and allocate it to museum categories. His huge collection of objects and photographs is well known as well as his publications. Browsing his notebooks, however, one can find a wild assemblage of different genres, from names of people and places, to anthropometric calculations, from cartoons to true to detail drawings, from detailed observations to strands of thoughts. As this material is so extensive and on top, his handwriting is very hard to read, this data seems to refuse access and analyzation.

Having the colonial burden of museum categories in mind, our project seeks not to use those categories again, but to find alternative ways to make the Felix Speiser archive accessible. Although the archive should be open to the public, we want to reach out to communities from Vanuatu and other stakeholders to work with the Felix Speiser archive and the Museum der Kulturen Basel as an institution. How can this extensive material be tamed, and its mostly unknown content be made accessible so that not only the museum can work with it but people around the world?

To achieve more accessibility, we would be very interested in being able to search Speiser notebooks for certain key terms. Toponyms, people names or travel routes, that are dispersed in different formats of notebooks, could be particularly valuable. Or data on objects, certain cluster of words, colonial content or architectural features to name a few examples. In shifting the focus, we hope to reconsider and finally decolonize Felix Speiser’s legacy.

Image source: abebooks