Wiki Wicca – teaching data literacy with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft and Wikidata

Abstract

The pressing need for implementing data literacy in the curriculum to produce a workforce equipped with the data skills necessary to meet the needs of Scotland’s growing digital economy presents a massive opportunity for educators, researchers, data scientists and repository managers alike. This presentation will provide an example of real-world application of teaching and learning as part of a Data Science for Design MSc at the University of Edinburgh and how working with Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, motivated student volunteers to surface a much-loved repository of information, the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database, to enable further insights and research. A project that the students felt proud to take part in and found “very meaningful”. Building a bibliographical repository: the sum of all citations The power of linked open data to share knowledge between different institutions and different repositories, between geographically and culturally separated societies, and between languages is a beautiful empowering thing. Sharing your data to Wikidata is also the most cost-effective way to surface your repository’s data. This presentation will also include how we are importing data from Edinburgh Research Archive’s thesis collection into Wikidata and outline the suite of easy-to-use tools available which scrape source metadata from PMIDS, DOIs, and ORCID identifiers to help build a bibliographic repository of researchers and research papers in Wikidata. Because this is stored as linked data, the data can be linked to, and leverage from, other complementary datasets enabling the direct and indirect relationships to be explored in this semantic web of knowledge. Third party applications can then be built with user-friendly UIs to read/write from Wikidata like the Scholia Web service which creates on-the-fly scholarly profiles for researchers, organizations, journals, publishers, individual scholarly works, and research topics.