QRCode as a Souvenir for Socio-Economic Impact around Art, History & Culture
My presentation from WikiConference India 2016
Reaching out to others! Free & Open Source Software, Kannada, L10n, L18n Data Science, Cloud Computing & more…
My presentation from WikiConference India 2016
This gif shows how our team contributed to Internet Archive, Wiki Commons and Kannada Wikisource by uploading out of copyright books from DLI and OUDL libraries effectivly to ensure they are reachable to larger audience round the clock.
GIF contributed by Yogesh C.S.
About an year ago, we found that it is almost becoming difficult/worse to search the Kannada books on DLI (Digital Library Of India) and OUDL (Osmania University Digital Library).
Reasons:
Aitihaasika Kathaaval’i Erd’aneya Bhaaga. |
To view the Books Online Download Alternatiff plugin for Windows Users and Plugger plugin for Linux Users(install GTK,GLIB prerequisites) |
These reasons were more than enough to encourage ourselves to do something around this. We started a small project to pull the metadata of these libraries and see if we can do something about the books.
We initiated a crowdsourcing project on our community portal https://samooha.sanchaya.net, pushed the metadata that Pavithra had collected from the DLI & OUDL websites and requested people to help us transcribe the book name, publisher name and author names to Kannada in Unicode. Following video demonstrates how crowd sourcing helped us get the metadata transformed into useful information quickly.
We had fun working on the above interface ourself as it was fun seeing the donut graphs turning blue while we downloaded many books which we found interesting or which we had missed to read all these days. It was a same experience for others who joined us from various countries to help us with this crowd sourcing activity. Thanks to Devaraj (Devu) who helped quickly put this module live.
Apart from getting the data, we also worked on getting it validated. More or less same set of people helped going through the books once again to see that we don’t have incorrect information for the metadata.
Now, it was time to let people search these books on Internet without much effort. Atleast they can find the Book names, authors and publishers in Kannada. We made this possible via https://pustaka.sanchaya.net
Above image is just a snapshot. 5000+ books being searched on this platform from 100+ categories.
We had admitted for a while that the work is done, but the queries followed our tweets and blog posts on the above projects. We discovered more issues. People desperately wanted to download some of these books, find some which had different author names, some books did not have the right information as printer name was used as publisher’s name and so on…
Apart from that we had more technical issues which we did over see while working on metadata and other things in early stage of this project. i.e availability of the digital library portals round the clock. DLI & OUDL used to fail serving the pages or files intermittently. OUDL library used to go offline after 5pm just like the government offices shutdown. Writing to concerned people never yielded any results.
I’m writing this whole story because we believe that the work of making these books accessible to all Kannadigas is NOT OVER. We need more work to be done. We thought we should have wiki pages for all these books. Request people to join us writing more about the books, about the authors and the printing presses, publishers. Fellow wikimedians also heard about our idea and helped us write a plan for the same. As a result, I ended up submitting our project plan to Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grant.
Please find the detailed IEG project plan here: Growing Kannada-language Wikimedia projects with a digital library
We have been lucky have been chosen to work on this project along with the other 13 participants who submitted excellent ideas. Read more about the other IEG projects here on Wikimedia Blog.
We are now gearing up to work on the project in full swing. This IEG requires us to teach new wikipedians/wanna be wikipedians to learn about Wiki Editing while working on making the Kannada Books from Digital libraries searchable/made available for learning/research etc.
It’s a challenge to make this happen as it again involves crowdsourcing activities in various stages. Involves understanding how we can control the mass editing on wikipedia while taking care of the edit quality and more.
Looking forward for lots of support and encouragement for us here.
If you wish to contribute back to this list, please send me a personal message from the contact page to be added as a contributor on hackpad.
A late night chat with Shri NAM Ismail (Prajavani) gives me a chance to look at creative commons from Vachana’s point of view. For few of my questions and observations on Creative Commons adoption in India here is what he had to say:
“If you can understand allama then you can understand CC an copy left”
Here is Allama Prabhu’s vachana which he quoted during our chat:
ವೇದವೆಂಬುದು ಓದಿನ ಮಾತು; ಶಾಸ್ತ್ರವೆಂಬುದು ಸಂತೆಯ ಸುದ್ದಿ.
ಪುರಾಣವೆಂಬುದು ಪುಂಡರ ಗೋಷ್ಠಿ ತರ್ಕವೆಂಬುದು ತಗರ ಹೋರಟೆ.
ಭಕ್ತಿ ಎಂಬುದು ತೋರಿ ಉಂಬ ಲಾಭ.
ಗುಹೇಶ್ವರನೆಂಬುದು ಮೀರಿದ ಘನವು
My questions were simple, why we are taking too long to understand Creative Commons? Why we don’t understand “Free Culture” philosophy? Why we just read “Free” as just “Free” anywhere but not as in “Freedom”.
Today 55 books of prominent Kannada Niranjana were released under CC by his daughter and writer Tejaswini Niranjana in Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi. “Media houses should be encouraged to release some work under Creative Commons” says NAM Ismail.
More about my questions, answers, findings and research in some other blog. Till then spend some time researching what 11th and 12th century vachanakaara’s had thought of veda’s on Vachana Sanchaya.
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