WikiCite 2018/Program/Seals-Nutt

Title: Science Stories: 'Unforgetting' the Lives and Works of Incredible People with Wikidata, Commons, and IIIF

Abstract

Images capture human attention. When digital images circulate on the web, people often gather information from the visual content alone. There may be embedded metadata in an image, perhaps automatically generated by the digital camera the photographer used. People do not often embed descriptive metadata into digital images they share online. The standards for image application programming interfaces (APIs) that the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) created provide guidance for how to communicate descriptive, technical, and administrative metadata along with images on the web. We will demo an application in which we combine images and structured data from Wikidata to tell stories. We tell science stories in this application related to the lives of under-represented people involved in scientific research. Many of these stories have not yet been told on the web, we aim to raise their profile.

We demonstrate how free software and open standards can be leveraged to create visually appealing, interactive, information experiences which allow people to extend science communication to additional social spaces on the web. Images are an important component of scientific communication. Images draw human viewers in, and captivate interest. Science communication of the twenty-first century allows us to reconnect images with descriptive, technical, and administrative metadata in a web presentation, and to combine these images with structured statements in the web of linked data, backed by references to published sources. To learn more about the work that we are doing, feel free to check out ScienceStories.io.

Bio

Kenneth Seals-Nutt is the co-founder (along with Dr. Katherine Thornton) of Science Stories, a web application aimed at raising the online presence of under-represented people involved in STEM and scientific research. He is also a researcher and software developer for Yale University in the Department of Digital Preservation and Conservation at the Yale University Library contributing to the Wikidata for Digital Preservation initiative. Seals-Nutt is currently based in Oakland, California where he works as a Software Engineer at Pandora Media.

Pronouns: He/Him/His

Education+Affiliation: Yale University

Projects: Science Stories (sciencestories.io), Wikidata for Digital Preservation (wikidp.org)

Personal Link: ksn.io

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kennethseals-nutt/

ORCID: 0000-0002-5926-9245