For Heritage Week 2024 our fellow Wikimedia Community member Anne-Karoline will be hosting a talk at Mayfair Library in Kilkenny about her experience using Open Data for mapping for mapping heritage sites and community landmarks and services.
In this talk will share her experience of visiting and recording ogham stones, field names, mass paths, and holy wells in County Kilkenny using Open Data and open-source platforms. The methodology can be applied to other monument types and geographic areas. While this might sound technical, it starts with simple things like taking pictures with your phone which almost everyone can do.
Ahead of the event Anne-Karoline (“the girl who does the mapping”), an advocate of Open Data for mapping heritage sites and community landmarks and services shares her reflections on this work. Read on to be inspired to visit your local heritage sites and harness the power of local knowledge which can be turned into useful data that can be used by heritage societies and scholars alike.
All are welcome to come along to this free event. For more information visit heritageweek.ie.
Bookings — Mayfair Library : 056 779 4174 / Email: mayfair@kilkennylibrary.ie
Mapping Heritage with Anne-Karoline (“The Girl who does the Mapping”)
Since early June, I have been working on a database of holy wells in County Kilkenny using the linked open data possibilities the Wikiverse offers. It all started off with attending a Digital Humanities Conference in Cork where I spoke about mapping ogham stones and met Florian Thiery from the WikiProject Irish Ogham Stones and Research Squirrel Engineers Network. Florian kindly helped me get started and set up my own project page where all the statements are documented. I had created the odd Wikidata entry before (mostly for monuments), but the last two months have been a very enjoyable steep learning curve.
My background is mostly as a mapper on OpenStreetMap (user name b-unicycling) where I have mapped ogham stones, holy wells and a lot of other things relating to heritage, but also everyday features. In 2020, if I remember correctly, I started a YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/@OSM4HistoryBuffs) focussing on tutorials about how to map heritage on OpenStreetMap. There are a couple of videos about Wikidata and Wikimedia as well. This came to an end roughly around the time I started focussing on holy wells, partly because I had run out of things to make tutorials about.
I had mapped and photographed holy wells all along, but this has now become my latest project, where I pursue it more in-depth and more or less systematically.
Written resources
Using my own research, the Historic Environment Viewer and Pádraig Ó Dálaigh’s 2018 thesis about the holy wells of County Kilkenny (available for download here), I created Wikidata entries for all the holy wells (213 to date, but some might be duplicates, see below). I’m adding the location either from my own survey, the Historic Environment Viewer or the ITM converted to GPS from Ó Dálaigh’s thesis. I add all the written sources I can find, including old Ordnance Survey maps and the Schools’ Collection. I have had to create Wikidata entries for all those as well to make that possible. Most of these are just very short mentions of the holy well in a pattern of “in townland X, there is a holy well dedicated to St. Y”.
As I have done with place names in the past, I also add the “named after” statement which I thought might be interesting, because it can show how many holy wells are named after certain saints, natural features or cures. The ones named after a townland were presumably once also named after a saint or cure, but the name got lost in the mists of time.
Visual data
To get the ground truth, I try to visit as many sites as possible and take several pictures and a video. I’m lucky enough to have a GoPro Max (sponsored by Meta for mapping), so for some of them, there are 360° videos. These cannot be uploaded to Wikimedia, but they can all be found on YouTube which is linked on Wikidata using the YouTube video ID. After some failed attempts to convert videos from *.mp4 to *.webm, I found an editor (VideoPad editor) that not only is able to edit 360° videos but can also export to *.webm. I upload the *webm videos to Wikimedia and link them on Wikidata, of course. I believe that a video can tell much more than photos, especially with the very neglected and overgrown wells/ springs. I try to film the approach to the well so that people find it easier to recognise the place, should they try to visit them. People have actually commented on some videos that they did visit them after watching my video.
For the less overgrown and more architectural holy wells, I’m also creating photogrammetry models using the KiriEngine app which is super easy to use. You can export from there to *.obj files and upload to Sketchfab. These can be linked using the “external data available at URL” (P1325) statement. I tried exporting into a Wikimedia-compatible format, but without success so far. These files are also very large, and I would not want to clutter up Wikimedia with them.
Some, if not most of the holy wells are no longer in use, have been filled in or covered over and are difficult to trace. It does not help that most of the location descriptions in the Schools’ Collection are very vague like “There is a well in Jim Murphy’s Field in [townland name]”, when very few field names have been recorded, and the name of the field might have completely changed since the 1930s. Jim Murphy might have also had a different name on it, like “The Well Field”. This might lead to unintended duplicates in the database.
Some of my photos on Wikimedia have already been used by the local newspaper (without attribution).
Filter and search options
I find it very useful to have all this data on Wikidata while I’m adding more information from more sources. It is of course also very useful to be able to use the Wikidata query functions either for quality control or for creating graphics, maps or searching for certain aspects.
Drawbacks
There are a few shortcomings I see with Wikidata: Firstly, it is potentially quite vulnerable, but luckily, only a minority even knows about Wikidata, and of course, the history of each item is recorded. Secondly, there are certain things I would like to record where I either had to be creative with statements (using “street address” for the description of the location in certain fields, for example) or ignore warnings (using “feast day” for the pattern day which is not allowed for holy wells). I would like to record the reputed cures, for example, because it would be great to be able to see how many reputedly cured sore eyes or headaches or warts etc.
Overall, though, it has been very interesting and enjoyable so far; I have learned a lot more about Kilkenny’s history by going through a number of publications by local history groups and talking to “de locals” on the ground.
I’ll be giving a more thorough talk about Linked Open Data and heritage during Heritage Week, on August 19th at 11:30 in the Mayfair Library in Kilkenny: https://www.heritageweek.ie/event-listings/citizen-science-kilkenny-heritage-sites-linked-open-data.
