February is the month of “love” and besides Valentine’s Day, researchers and scholars can share their love of data and folklore. International Love Data Week (Feb. 12-16, 2024) and Wiki Loves Folklore (Feb. 1-March 31, 2024) share a common goal. Beth South, the IU East Access Services librarian, explains in this blog about various open access efforts. Beth’s work includes promoting open education and navigating copyright law. She is currently participating in the Creative Commons Certificate Program, focused on advancing open knowledge building and sharing while adhering to copyright law.
The Creative Commons started as a non-profit in 2001, and by 2002, created a set of open licenses that allowed content creators and researchers world-wide to openly share their work with the public, proactively giving people the ability to use the works to further their own creative and educational pursuits within the terms of the creative commons license. This type of sharing promotes equitable access to information, creativity, and can allow others to build upon someone else’s work, continuing knowledge building that can contribute to the common good. The Creative Commons, which is also its own global movement, became the foundation of other open movements, including Open Data and Open Culture.
What is Open Data?
SPARC’s definition of Open Data is “research data that is freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyze, re-process, pass to software or use for any purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” Many of the benefits of open data includes improving the integrity of scientific research, accelerating the pace of discovery (Hello, Covid vaccines!), and ensuring we don’t miss critical breakthroughs and discovery.
International Love Data Week
Having access to data is vital in all fields, so we want to share an event that can help you love data, and hopefully, advocate for open data in your profession. Happening this week is International Love Data Week. This is an annual celebration held during the week of Valentine’s Day, and seeks to encourage nonprofits, universities, government agencies, and businesses to take part in data-related activities and events. This year’s theme is “My Kind of Data,” where people can learn about “data equity and inclusion, disciplinary communities, and creating a kinder world through data.” Some of the events happening are Responsible Participatory Qualitative Data Research: A Xicana’s Methodological Journey in Decolonizing Gang Life Studies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Research: Data Considerations for Safe and Productive Research Projects, Douglass Day Transcribe-a-thon, or for the Taylor Swift fan, Swiftatistics: How the Eras Tour Inspired a Data Movement.
International Love Data week is a good reminder that data is not all just numbers and spreadsheets. It’s also facts that support our research, inform our thinking, and help us build connections.
What is Open Culture?
Perhaps data is not your thing, and you prefer the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums). Open GLAM or Open Culture is a “movement and a loose network of institutions and people dealing with cultural heritage that work together to increase the number of works available in the public domain, grow the cultural commons, make cultural heritage available online without undue copyright restrictions, and help others implement open access policies to cultural heritage” (Creative Commons).
Many of us today may take for granted the fact that we can go online and take a virtual tour of The British Museum, the Louvre or Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, or Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art. Through Google Arts and Culture, you can explore famous cultural and historic sites in 3D through Open Heritage. For written works and photographs, Digital Public Library of America is a great example of archives and libraries sharing their historic collections. For years, access to these collections was usually closed to many people due to socio-economic circumstances. Openly available historical and cultural collections provide equitable access for the public to explore other cultures, places, and times. Open Culture enhances recreational viewing, inspires creativity, and like Open Data, can also improve educational and scientific content.
Wiki Loves Folklore
Not only can museums and archives be stewards of culture and heritage, but individuals can too. One of the biggest examples of “Open” is Wikipedia’s image commons, Wikimedia. Based on the Wiki Loves Love theme in 2019, Wikimedia began the Wiki Loves Folklore international photographic competition. The contest serves “as a vital catalyst for preserving intangible cultural heritage,” and “encourages people from diverse backgrounds to capture and share images representing their cultural heritage.” This competition runs every year from February 1st to March 31st. Since it started, the competition has gathered 79,844 media files from 168 countries. These photos are all openly available for anyone to use under a Creative Commons license.
For those who want to participate in 2024 Wiki Loves Folklore, there are cash prizes for the winners. For faculty looking to change their courses a little, this event can also be a creative assignment for students and a great way to include open pedagogy practices (open and collaborative knowledge building and sharing) into the classroom.
Both Wiki Loves Folklore and International Love Data Week share the common goal of expanding our knowledge, preserving our different cultures and communities, and building an equitable and inclusive worldview. As educators and scholars, we can all love and support open movements as a vital partner to education and research.
The Campus Library has been a longtime supporter of open access and open education initiatives and maintains an Open Access and OER libguide, where we curate open access scholarly resources and collections, including some GLAM institutions and Open Data websites. If you have any questions about Creative Commons, open movements, or copyright, please contact Assistant Librarian of Access and Technical Services Beth South at eabrockm@iue.edu.
Reference:
“Unit 1.3 Creative Commons and Open GLAM.” By Creative Commons License: CC BY: Attribution