Coding da Vinci North – About the Sound of the Stars, Visiting Landmarks and Copper Gorillas
This year the regional edition of our culture hackathon has been published for the first time, to the delight of Philipp Geisler, the head of the project. Justice has been done to the notion of ‘northern’, and greetings have been extended to more than 100 participants, not only from Hamburg but also from Göttingen, Bremen and Kiel. Even an international public from Denmark and Sweden has travelled to the kick-off event of Coding da Vinci Nord at the weekend of September 17th/18th in Hamburg.
The venue is the “Mindspace” at Rödingsmarkt next to Hamburg’s harbour. In the Altes Klöppelhaus (Old Clapper House) we have a spacious open room, in which Elvis, surrounded by light bulbs, is hanging on the wall, overlooking a long wooden table, sofas, easy chairs and balloons, the latter of which are to play a non-negligible role in creative socializing. The room swiftly fills up and young developers, designers and creative talents sit down with representatives of Hamburg’s cultural institutions and others. The lively hullabaloo speaks for itself. Even before the official greeting and the presentation of cultural sets of data, there is plenty to talk about.
Firstly, the founding team of Coding da Vinci insists on briefly retelling the tale of the hackathon, on presenting two projects from last year and on explaining why the event this year is regional rather than national, as it was.
Stephan Bartholmei, responsible for developing projects and innovation at the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), put it in a nutshell: In looking back on last year, there was agreement that the relationships between developers and cultural institutions should, after the end of the hackathon, be given a more lasting form. The solution: shortening the path between institutions and creative talents and shaping a “Freundeskreis 2.0 (Circle of Friends 2.0)” – like the “Freundeskreis Museum (Museum Circle)”. The notion is greeted with applause, and the four corner stones – as they call themselves – who have designed and developed the format, Anja Müller from Servicestelle Digitalisierung Berlin, Helene Hahn from Open Knowledge Foundation, Barbara Fischer from Wikimedia Deutschland and Stephan Bartholmei from the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek take the stage for presenting the data.
Sets of Data and Cultural Dating
Altogether 26 offers of data from 19 cultural institutions are presented, which comes to about 600,000 sets of data, of which 180,000 are media data. Yet, we have no need to take notes, since an event draughtsman visualizes the brief presentation as it goes along, letting us listen without interruption. The sets of data are various, thrilling and inspiring. For instance, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky (Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky) presents all in all four collections, including the most valuable digitalized items in the library, 161 copper engravings from the Netherlands, dating back to about 1600.
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts) contributes more than 8,400 items: the collection’s focus being on photography – from the daguerreotype of the 19th century to the early colour photography of the 1930s. The Archäologische Museum Hamburg Stadtmuseum Harburg/Helms-Museum (Hamburg Archaeological Museum City Museum Hamburg/Helms-Museum) contributes 300 data, covering the most important complexes of archaeological finds from the metropolitan region of Hamburg and ranging from 40,000 BC to the middle of the 19th century.
Further impressive sets of data come from the Stiftung Historischer Museen Hamburg (Historical Museums Hamburg Foundation), with ship portraits from the Altonaer Museum and materials from the Werbemittelarchiv Reemtsa. The Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (Historical Site Neuengamme) presents data about forced labour in Hamburg during the Nazi period – this being a sensitive area, care is requested in sensitive dealing with the materials.
There follow many further cultural sets of data from the Kieler Gelehrtenverzeichnis (Kiel Scholar Directory) of the University of Kiel about listed buildings, ranging from the Danish National Museum to paintings in the Swedish National Museum and archives of historical astronomical photographic plates belonging to the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (Leibnitz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam).
The presentation of the sets of data leads on to “cultural dating”: The sets of data visualized by the event draughtsman are hung up in the room, and representatives of the cultural institutes stand in front of it and wait for interested hackers, to answer queries and talk about projects. Small groups swiftly gather round the posters and begin the brainstorming about how the data might be used in new contexts.
The pitching of ideas and projects
Ideas put forward by the creative talents take form, step by step: Ideas are first put forward on Saturday then are presented on Sunday evening with a fixed team and a prototype. This is where the balloons, mentioned above, are used: When projects are put forward on Saturday, each idea or presenter of an idea is allotted a balloon. This helps to ease the problem of remembering names and faces, since anyone interested in a particular project only has to remember the hue of the tallying balloon. The local organizers’ idea visually impresses as well, as colourful balloons are soon bobbing on the arms of the creative.
An interesting feature of the project pitching is how the sets of data plainly favoured by the culture hackers crystallized out in former years. In the year 2014 the data consisted of books banned in the Nazi period and in 2015 of piano rolls for self-playing pianos, whereas this year three projects are being presented for the ship portraits in the Altonaer Museum and three projects for the copper engravings in the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg.
The teams get together on Sunday and use their time to develop projects and the first prototypes for the presentation in the evening. Meanwhile various workshops are offered: ranging from the “Prototype Fund”, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation, furthered by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (German Ministry for Education and Research), which supports small open-source projects to present the API of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek to the “Visualisierung der Besucher, Guides und Museen von Hamburg (Visualization of the Visitor, Guides and Museums in Hamburg)”, “Cognitive Computing” from IBM Watson, and the Interpretation of Nazi Biographies.
The projects put forward at the end of the second day sound promising: For instance, the project “Klang der Sterne (Sound of the Stars)” explores what outer space sounds like on the basis of historic astronomical photographic plates, whereby MIDI values are mapped onto the stars’ magnitudes. At “Visiting Landmarks” users can get to know more than 9,000 listed buildings in Denmark, thanks to the data offered by the Danish National Museum. The “Kupfergorillas (Copper Gorillas)” make a visit to an exhibition a playful experience by means of augmented reality elements, and “Hansestadt Hamburg Historical Heritage (Hansa Harbour Hamburg’s Historical Heritage)” invites visitors to explore the city with the help of historical maps from the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky.
Not all projects can be mentioned here, but let it be said that altogether 17 of them are registered at the Hackdash of Coding da Vinci Nord and are to be presented at the award-winners’ ceremony on the 6th of November.
This is something to be looked forward to, certainly by us, and we would like to take the opportunity of thanking our local event team, the head of the project Philipp Geisler, the Archäologisches Museum Hamburg, Code for Hamburg, eCulture.info, Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft, Projekte&Seminare – Sabine Heydenbluth, Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, We-Build.City and Wikipedia Hamburg as well as “Mindspace Hamburg” for the lovely rooms.
What next?
The team of Coding da Vinci Nord, together with Code for Hamburg is offering all projects their support up to the award winners’ ceremony on the 6th of November. All important dates and deadlines as well as contact information are to be found on the website of Coding da Vinci.
We wish all projects success and fun in being developed!
To the theme page of Coding da Vinci the Culture Hackathon