This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
January marked the beginning of the seventh term of the Open Knowledge Practicum program, which invites researchers from UVic and the greater Victoria community into the lab to work on their own projects and to share their knowledge in open environments, including Wikipedia.
This term, the lab hosted nine researchers, some new and some continuing from the previous term. Their projects are wide-ranging in scope, subject matter, methodology, and presentation, and all of them engage with open knowledge production.
Caitlin Burritt has joined the lab for the past two terms to work on We are Harmless, a graphic novel about Holocaust memory, part of her Master’s project in the Holocaust Studies program at UVic. She captured some of her project’s development in a video. Caitlin also contributed a Wikipedia article about Rainer Opolka’s sculpture exhibition Die Wölfe sind zurück? [The Wolves are Back?].
Justin Conway developed an experimental prototype of an open access digital exhibit of images of the female body from the Perfecta: Perfection of the Female Body project, currently in development. Built in Omeka, the prototype includes three exhibits containing multiple images and accompanying metadata. He also contributed to a number of articles on Wikipédia: Albrecht Dürer, Ambroise Paré, André Vésale, Charles Estienne, and Conrad Lycosthenes.
Lauren Elle DeGaine created an open access digital exhibit called Women at the Front: A Digital Exhibit of Victorian Frontispiece Illustrations. The exhibit features images of frontispieces featuring women in Victorian novels held in the UVic Libraries stacks and Special Collections. Lauren Elle built the site in WordPress and shared the images in Wikimedia Commons.
Simin (CiCi) Li spent the term conducting research about Chinese social network analysis and the New Zhijiang Army. She contributed to the Wikipedia article New Zhijiang Army and presented her research as a conference paper.
Martha Mena developed a Wikipedia article about the artist and entrepreneur Fernanda Murray and started development on an app to facilitate collaboration between young women interested in entrepreneurship.
Ying Liu has joined the lab for the past two terms to work on the open access project Glimpses into Chinese Immigration History in Canada: The World Journal and the New Republic newspapers. The exhibit includes photos, interview videos, and images of selected articles from the two Chinese community newspapers as well as the early communication from the Canadian Censorship files regarding to the history of the newspaper. Ying also contributed a new article to Wikipedia on The New Republic.
Charlotte Schallié is developing an ongoing project called Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.
Ann Stahl and Elisa O’Malley are developing an ongoing project linked to an SSHRC-Partnership Development grant called Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past (IAfF). During the spring term Ann and Elisa focused efforts on building a vault repository of 
digital heritage resources related to an IAfF collaboration with the Banda Traditional Area in Ghana. The repository includes archival images, documents and video resources that inform on the history of daily life in Banda. The resources they have developed will be the focus of a Banda community workshop in late June. Once the community has had an opportunity to vet the resources and provide input on draft exhibits, the materials will go live through UVic Libraries.
This term’s OKP projects were featured in digital demo at Online Engagement Within and Beyond the University, a day-long event featuring public talks and a “Women in STEM” Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Our Honorary Resident Wikipedian for 2017–2019, Constance Crompton, was on hand for inspiration and support, as were Michael Radmacher and Matt Huculak from University of Victoria Libraries.