As Wikipedian in Residence at Te Papa, Siobhan Leachman researched the research expeditions the museum has undertaken since the Colonial Museum was founded in 1865. Siobhan and Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader show how sharing this information through the open linked data platform Wikidata has made it easier to learn about the expeditions and what they discovered.
Captain Alexander Black
From 1946 onwards Alexander Black was the owner and captain of the vessel MV Alert. With Black at the helm this ship safely carried many of the country’s leading natural history scientists on research expeditions around Aotearoa’s seas and safely home again. These successful journeys are a less-known backbone of scientific discovery in New Zealand.
The role of Black and the MV Alert has been made more visible by a project to add information about these expeditions to Wikidata, Wikipedia’s structured data sibling. With a quick query we can see that this vessel was involved in at least three expeditions, and from there it’s just a few jumps to learning about new species discovered on these trips.
Research expeditions project
The Te Papa Research Expeditions Wikiproject was a 12-week residency funded by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand undertaken by Wikimedian Siobhan Leachman.
Siobhan’s main goal was to test out a proposed data structure for describing research expeditions in a standardised way, so that it becomes easier to share information about what happened, who was involved, what was discovered, and more.
Taking information about Te Papa-related expeditions from publications, databases, archives, and even the names of species (Exilia expeditionis is pretty on the nose), she created items for them in Wikidata. Using its linked data structure she connected them to the participants, places visited, and the institutions that now hold what they found. The links continued as Siobhan joined them up to the publications written and species discovered, creating an interlocking web of knowledge.
This project is part of a large international effort to collate and link up data about all research expeditions, from those that happened hundreds of years ago like Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand to the ones happening now like the recently returned Ocean Census expedition.
Other members of the project behind the project are testing out the data structure at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo, and Naturalis Biodiversity Centre.
All this effort will lead to an international standard and guidance that helps natural history institutions share and link their own research expedition data, joining it to the knowledge web Te Papa’s already hooked into.
Fun with data
Once the data’s in Wikidata, you can get it out again – queries like the one above that tells you what the MV Alert got up to mean you can find answers to all sorts of questions, and visualise what you find in useful ways.
By asking for the information about the Dominion Museum’s expedition of 1962–1963 (Q124815298 in Wikidata) you can then get pictures of the people and places involved, and see how all the parts fit together.
Because the data is openly licensed you can easily reuse and share it. For example, that same cloud of data powers an online visualisation that takes you through the islands visited by the expedition.
Putting research expedition data into Wikidata is helping Wikipedia as well. The article for this expedition has an infobox that pulls details straight from Wikidata – and if something gets updated there, Wikipedia will instantly use the new version.
What we learned
When structured out this way, it becomes clear that expeditions are more than some people and a boat. Each one is a node of biodiversity, geography, social connections, career progression, funding decisions, methods of science communication and much more.
We’re able to see how people get celebrated in taxonomy. The Tītī / Muttonbird Islands Expedition in 1955 collected several type specimens, including the one used to describe the species Plectophanes hollowayae, named in honour of expedition participant Beverley Anne Holloway.
We see the pathways that scientists and conservationists took across their careers. Robert Falla (director of the Dominion Museum for nearly 20 years) can be traced bouncing around the Pacific throughout the middle of the 20th century.
We also see what areas have been treated as important by scientific organisations (and their funders). From the set of expeditions related to Te Papa in some way, 6 of them visited the Auckland Islands, and 9 went to Antarctica.
Because expeditions visited (and took from) Māori lands, often relied on Māori guidance to navigate those environments or find specimens, and sometimes directly used mātauranga in resulting publications, they encapsulate Māori data.
Even when this knowledge has been publicly available for decades (for example in Elsdon Best’s book Waikare-Moana, the result of an expedition led and informed by Tūtakangahau, a Tūhoe chief and tohunga), the community that is the source and custodian of that knowledge has rights regarding the access and use of it.
Through some kōrero inside the museum and making use of guidance like the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the Māori Data Governance Model, we decided not to create Wikidata items that would enable such direct access to mātauranga without seeing what the iwi involved want.
The result is guidance being fed back to the international group that institutions should recognise where communities have a stake in this kind of data, and work with them to support their data sovereignty.
What comes next
For the first time Te Papa has a single, highly-detailed list of the expeditions we’ve been involved with across more than 150 years. We’re in the process of turning this data into records in our collections management system, which will then show up on Collections Online. Over time we’ll add more detail and new expeditions as they happen, making these pages useful sources for new Wikidata items as well.
How we map from the Wikidata schema to fields in EMu
Once we have these records, we’ll start linking them to the people involved and the specimens they collected. As other institutions do the same thing, researchers will get a more complete picture thanks to everyone connecting through Wikidata.
This is also a foundation for now telling the stories of these expeditions. Surfacing these details in the form of structured data gives us all sorts of jumping off points, whether that’s writing up the tale of Captain Black or producing data-driven visualisations.
We’ll be adding Topic pages to Collections Online for each expedition covered by the project. Starting with the information that’s been added to Wikidata, they’ll be fleshed out with richer detail as we learn more.
Other institutions can use Siobhan’s project report if they’d like to do something similar, and can ping digitaloutreach@tepapa.govt.nz with any questions.
Come to the editathon
And if you’re curious about research expeditions, we’re holding a Wikipedia editathon on 13 July 2024. You can help tell these stories and learn how to make your own contributions, with friendly editors and free kai!
Find out about the editathon and how to book.
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