The Coding da Vinci culture hackathon awards ceremony
It was hot, the technology did not want to fully cooperate and nevertheless: united by the sweat of brows, with creative technical workarounds and programmes misused for subjects, the Coding da Vinci awards ceremony was held on Sunday, 5 July, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Plants, bricks and the hunt for pictures, notes, revolts and “Wasserspeyer”, Lebkuchen games, traces of stones and animated patent drawings: the 20 project teams presented their ideas and approaches full of suspense and unimpressed by technical and temperature-related difficulties. The moderator promptly relented: spontaneous breaks were to be taken from an inside temperature of 35 degrees Celsius (there were two).
Whereas projects regarding books prohibited by the Nazi regime dominated in 2014, this year it was the piano rolls for self-playing pianos of the 19th century from the Deutsches Museum in Munich. And there was another difference compared to last year. While in 2014, several individual cultural institutions sent responses along the lines of: “Dear Mr Bartholmei, we are a public authority. We do not work together with hackers!,” as Stephan Bartholmei from the German Digital Library reports, this year, however, following the great results of the first culture hackathon, it proved possible to win over twice as many cultural institutions. It therefore transpired that 33 museums, archives, libraries, media libraries and scientific institutions provided over 600,000 data sets from 53 collections.
Cultural hackers had ten weeks to develop and technically implement ideas and concepts from these data sets. And even if not every project team was awarded a prize, every project was rewarded with sustained applause. The audience and organisers are impressed by the many digital and haptic applications and their implementation.
Coding da Vinci winners
Five winners in five categories (‘most useful’, ‘funniest hack’, ‘out of competition’, ‘best design’ and ‘most technical’) were announced by the five-person jury. The on-site audience decided on the sixth winner, ‘everybody’s darling’. The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek congratulates the award-winning projects and teams, and thanks all participants for their great dedication as well as for their ideas and implementations! The winning projects are listed below:
Category ‘most technical’:
Die Kurbelkamera (The “Crank Camera”)
With this exhibit a group can develop a feeling for the origins of the film camera by playing an old film on a screen by means of cranks, interacting with it, recording it and sharing the newly created film. While doing so, the focus is on the intuitive operability and simplicity of the exhibit.
Team:
Lukas Benedix
Alexa Schlegel
Fanny Steingräber
Katjuscha-Kaja Tömmler
Category ‘best design’:
Midiola
MIDIOLA is a smartphone app dedicated to the piano rolls for self-playing pianos from the early 20th century. The digitalised piano rolls from the collection of the Deutsches Museum in Munich can be played with our programme. Furthermore, physical piano rolls can also be filmed with a mobile phone camera in order to play live music.
Team:
Tom Brewe
Joscha Lausch
Momo Moradi
Luca Beisel
Category ‘funniest hack’:
Nuremberg Lebkuchen
The game principle is well-known because it is seen every day on a bus and train: sugar drops and colourful bonbons are industriously pushed together in combinations of 3, 4 or 5. But instead of sugar drops and bonbons, in this playable online app you make use of sugar, flour and cinnamon. These ingredients shall be moved, uh, baked to make delicious Lebkuchen, macaroons and gingerbread biscuits.
Team:
Thomas Tursics & Sons
Category ‚out of competition‘:
Rolling Stone
The Berlin Municipal Museum’s geological collection provided our team with a data set comprised of photos and information on almost 300 stones from their archive. The finds are several million years old and were transported from Scandinavia to Northern Germany by glaciers in the ice ages. The oldest stone originated an estimated 1.8 billion years ago. In order to make these chronologically and spatially elusive dimensions comprehensible, our team created the Rolling Stone project and developed a corresponding website. The “Trace of Stones” shall be brought closer to visitors through the combination of informative and playful participation.
Team:
Anika Schulz
Knut Perseke
Ulrika Müller
Thomas Fett
Category ‘most useful’ & ‘everybody’s darling’ (audience award)
floradex
As an interdisciplinary team, we ̶ Anne Lange (KHB, Product Design), Philipp Schröter (FU Berlin , Computer Science), Immanuel Pelzer (HU Berlin , Computer Science) and Paul Michaelis (FU Berlin , Computer Science) ̶ wanted to breathe new life into the difficult to access herbarium data of the Botanical Museum and Botanical Garden in Berlin. During our research we came across the fact that plant identification is very intricate and most scientifically correct identification media (primarily books) can only be utilised by experts. An unequivocal identification is often frustrating for laypeople: most of them can only answer decisive questions insufficiently due to their lack of expertise. This leads to the fact that they arrive at an unequivocal or completely incorrect result. That is why we have designed and programmed an app which enables the user on the go to intuitively recreate the plant which he or she is seeking by means of symbols in a kit and to identify this by means of these criteria. In the process, the user can repeatedly change the set filter and therefore follow and influence the quantity and accuracy of results. We integrate technical terms and the dry scientific content directly into the playful elements. That is why floradex has the potential to be utilised as a teaching aid in school. Project work with self-determined learning by touching and testing is a good alternative to classic teacher-centred teaching and obstinate rote memorisation. So interest can also be aroused for subjects that young people possibly reject at first. But floradex also provides easy access to botany for interested laypersons. Plants can be identified when walking, visiting the Botanical Garden or in a home garden without interfering with nature by means of optimisation for mobile devices.
Team:
Anne Lange
Philipp Schröter
Paul Michaelis
Immanuel Pelzer
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The closing event was held in the wonderful premises of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sincere thanks are also in order for this! The enthusiastic and dedicated audience did the rest to make the day a great success for the overall Coding da Vinci project.
The positive reactions of cultural institutions, the fantastic project ideas and the common creative process showed for the second time in succession how coveted freely usable cultural data are. They not only benefit developers, designers and cultural institutions, but enrich our society in a multifaceted manner.
Next year the work on Coding da Vinci as an organiser will be conceptually continued. However, the Coding da Vinci culture hackathon will only return in 2017 as a year-round programme in a new outfit.
Coding da Vinci is a joint project of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, Servicestelle Digitalisierung Berlin and Wikimedia Deutschland.
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Additional links
Website: http://codingdavinci.de
Projects: http://codingdavinci.de/projekte/
Twitter: @codingdavinci
Hashtag: #codingdavinci