One of the issues I discussed at my recent talk in the Art in Context: Identity, Ethics, and Insight symposium was the problem of representing anonymous artists in knowledge graphs. The solution that the Wikidata community has accepted is to associate a P170 (creator) claim with a somevalue snak having a P3831 (object has role) qualifier value of Q4233718 (anonymous). In RDF, this corresponds to a blank node and Wikidata claims using somevalue are represented by blank nodes in the Query Service.
VanderBot 1.9 supports somevalue
Optimizing Wordle guesses
I’ve recently started playing the viral word game “Wordle”. After numerous discussions among family members about guessing strategy, I decided to spend some time over the holiday weekend writing a Python script to play with different guessing algorithms and strategies.
IIIF implementation
In connection with uploading files to Wikimedia Commons as part of our WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, I’ve been working on the details of uploading images to the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Cantaloupe International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) server and providing IIIF manifests to describe them.
Uploading with Commonsbot
A few months ago, as part of our WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, we received permission to upload Public Domain works from the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery to Wikimedia Commons, where they will be more accessible to the public.
Latest Posts
Biological survey and monitoring data publishing guide
My coauthors and I have published a guide to help people understand how to use the new Humboldt Extension for Biological Inventories of the Darwin Core standard. The guide includes diagrams and detailed information about how to structure the data to capture the hierarchical structure typically found in monitoring projects.
Open Science recipes published
My colleage from the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Digital Lab, Shenmeng Xu, an I have published two chapters in the ACRL’s 2025 Open Science Cookbook. The Cookbook is a lighthearted take on technical topics where instructions are given in “recipe” format to teach beginners new tech skills.
Favorite winners of Nebula Award for Best Novel
In March 2025, I finished reading all 60 of the winners of the the Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. Many of my favorites were also winners of the Hugo Award, so I wrote a follow-up blog post to my earlier post about my favorite Hugo winners, focusing on favorites that weren’t already discussed in the Hugo post.