“Let All the World in Every Corner Sing” Providing Linked Data Access to Global Christian Hymnody in Wikidata

Abstract

WikiProject Christian Hymns began as one individual’s involvement in a pilot project to test Wikidata as an identity management platform, but it has continued on as a standalone project to improve the coverage of global Christian hymnody in Wikidata and connect the resulting data to library resources. The complexity of hymnody creates challenges in the Wikidata environment, with tunes ranging from African American spirituals and medieval chant to contemporary Christian worship melodies and adaptations of folk music. The addition of texts from a variety of sources and languages increases the complexity. This paper describes the creation of the project, discusses the difficulties encountered in developing a data model, shows visualizations that explore various aspects of the data, and demonstrates connections with library resources while considering ongoing challenges.