Albin Larsson: Blog

The Nationalmuseum API

Nationalmuseum, the national gallery of Sweden has had an API for about two and a half years (I think),but it has yet to have any public documentation. So I decided to write down its features and some random tips.

Capabilities

The API is able to return specific objects as well as returning all objects through pagination. Many objects also link to their external IIIF manifest.

Retrieving an object

https://api.nationalmuseum.se/api/objects/4000

Check.

Pagination through all objects

The API has two parameters for pagination page and limit. limit sets the number of objects you get per page, the default is 50 and allowed values range from 1-100.

Get the 100-200 objects:

https://api.nationalmuseum.se/api/objects?page=2&limit=100

The response also returns you the URLs for the previous and next pages taking the limit parameter into account.

Random notes

The URLs to items can seem daunting when you browse Nationalmuseums online collection but there is an alternative that’s easy to link to with the identifier you get from the API:

http://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&viewType=detailView&objectId=24342

A great way to find interesting objects in the collection and connect it to other sources is to ask Wikidata: Objects in Wikidata with Nationalmuseum IDs

Finally, for some inspiration, you could check out the Nationalmuseum VIKUS Viewer instance.

Reading List Week 6 2020

I haven’t done a weekly reading list on this blog since high school; this week I did for a mysterious unknown reason. Alternative title: Links with random mumblings.

GLAM and Museum Tech

• Building Wellcome Collection’s new archival storage service – Two too common issues: filenames consisting of identifiers that are forgotten sice long ago and file verification. Current efforts will save future developers and archivists at Wellcome one headache or two.
• Someone used neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality – I have had the pleasure to work a bit with colorization and upscaling at work. It raises interesting questions about authenticity.
• Engaging Absence – Do not only consider the data that you do not have but also present and represent it?
• Digitale handlingsmønstre i kunst- og museumssektoren – How Norwegian museum audiences use and interact with museums digital offerings. The first part I think is quite errorsome because of selection bias not taken into acount the rest is interesting but contains nothing revolutionary.

Accessibility

• Why You Should Choose HTML5 <article> Over <section> – Even if the title doesn’t teach you something new, the article will still show an actual useful use of the <section> element.
• HTML attributes to improve your users’ two factor authentication experience https://www.twilio.com/blog/html-attributes-two-factor-authentication-autocomplete – As often with web accessibility/usability things, what’s details to developers aren’t necessarily details for your users.
• Making Memes Accessible – Intresting problem; I’m however sligthly sceptical against the implementation. Partial image hashing could be a better solution to matching images maybe?

Other

• Old CSS, new CSS – Long write up about CSS and its past and current hacks.
• The Best Little Museum You Never Visited in Paris – The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris does now have an entry in my notebook.
• Semikolon: nio exempel! – I have tough feelings about semicolons; it’s potentially useless.

A SPARQL Editor for SOCH

About a year ago I made a custom SPARQL editor for the Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH/K-samsök) LOD platform since then it has served me, both at home and at the office. Now I’m hosting an instance for anyone to use. It was built both to aid me (and others) working with the over 8 million RDF records in SOCH as well as to be a prof of concept and reference for future work.

The editor comes with a ton of features including:

• Autocompletion of the entire SOCH ontology
• Autocompletion of some external endpoints, including Wikidata and Europeana
• Result visualizations, including a table, an image grid and a pie chart
• Integration with a query library
• Shareable queries
• A resizable code editor
• An interactive tour of its GUI

There is no official SPARQL endpoint for SOCH so the first time you uses the editor you will be asked to enter your own endpoint or a third party one.

You can find the editor here and yes it’s inspired by the WDQS GUI.

How to setup a SPARQL endpoint with SOCH data?

First I usually bulk download RDF records with SOCH download CLI. Secondly I load these into Fuseki (super easy to setup, but somewhat low performance if you load all of SOCH into it) or Blazegraph (trickier to setup but great performance).

Observations on AI Assisted Crowdsourcing

As a part of the “Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping” project facilitated by me in my role at the Swedish National Heritage Board we ran a pilot together the Swedish Performing Arts Agency around crowdsourcing translations of image descriptions this spring. In this post I’m briefly sharing some of my observations related to how AI assisted translations impacted the crowdsourcing campaign.

So to begin what did we do? We uploaded 1200 images to Wikimedia Commons all with descriptions in Swedish. Then we invited people to translate those descriptions into English using a tool built for that specific purpose.

In addition to the empty input field for the user to fill in there was also the “Google Translate” button. This button would prefill the input with the automatic translation from Google (the user would still need to edit/submit it). Except it was a little easier said then done…

Every now and then there would be an encoding error in the string returned from Google:

“Anna-Lisa Lindroth as Ofelia in the play Hamlet, Knut Lindroth​\'​s companion 1906. Scanned glass negative”

This type of errors were discovered during development of the tool but we decided to leave the issue there to see if users would catch it.

A while into the crowdsourcing campaign it became clear that the descriptions translated by Google Translate were of higher quality then the ones done entirely by humans. While it didn’t manage all the theater specific terms it was still simply more consistent.

After an user had been using the Google Translate button for a while without many or any edits needed they no longer caught obvious error such as the example above. The pilot wasn’t large enough to prove anything statistically it indicates that users quickly starts trusting automated data if an initial subset of it is of high quality.

If you want to know more about the entire project that was much larger then this pilot there is plenty for you to read.