Submissions:2018/Teaching with Wikidata: A Case Study


 * Title: Teaching with Wikidata: A Case Study


 * Theme (optional): Relationship Building & Support


 * Academic Peer Review option:  Yes


 * Type of submission: Presentation


 * Author: Clifford B. Anderson


 * E-mail address: clifford.anderson@vanderbilt.edu


 * Wikimedia username: Clifford_Anderson


 * Affiliation(s) (optional): Vanderbilt University


 * Abstract: In this talk, I discuss the use of Wikidata in a graduate seminar at Vanderbilt University. During the spring semester of 2018, a colleague and I taught a course titled The Digital Flânuer: Mapping Twentieth-Century Berlin. The seminar combined discussion about the history, literature, and subcultures of Berlin with instruction in fundamental techniques of the digital humanities, including geospatial data analysis, querying Wikidata, text mining, 3D modeling, and network analysis. Out of this digital whirlwhind, Wikidata emerged as a favorite among students, several of whom drew on Wikidata for their final projects. In this presentation, I explore practical means for incorporating Wikidata into the humanities classroom, indicate areas of difficulty for students (e.g., incomplete or misclassified data, misleading SPARQL queries, and challenges with transforming the data into other formats), and propose possible improvements to the Wikidata query interface to improve its utility in the college and university classroom.


 * Length of presentation: 30 min.


 * Special requests:


 * Preferred room size: 25


 * Have you presented on this topic previously? If yes, where/when?: No.


 * If you will be incorporating a slidedeck during your presentation, do you agree to upload it to Commons before your session, with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, including suitable attribution in the slidedeck for any images used?: Yes.


 * Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?: Yes.

Interested attendees
'''If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. ( ~ ).'''


 * 1) Add your username here.