‘Collaborate or fail!’ – Coding da Vinci 2015. How it all began.
This year’s edition of the Coding da Vinci culture hackathon was launched on the weekend of the 25th and 26th April. Programmers, design students, representatives from cultural institutions, the Secretary for Cultural Affairs and members of the new generation of hackers gathered for a grand pitch of ideas and data on the premises of Wikimedia Deutschland.
Day 1: One Minute Madness for cultural institutions
Prior to the start of the event visitors were able to consult the ‘Dataset Wall’ for information on the institutions taking part and the material on offer. Coding da Vinci was then opened by Barbara Fischer of Wikimedia Deutschland, Helene Hahn of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKN), Anja Müller from the Service Center Digitization Berlin (digis) and Stephan Bartholmei of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. After their welcome addresses and words of appreciation, the Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, Berlin, Tim Renner, took the podium. He used the opportunity to draw people’s attention to the ‘Terminal Plus’ digital stage that he has planned for Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre, soon to have a new Intendant in the form of current Tate Modern director Chris Dercon. This was his bridge to the subject of Coding da Vinci. Renner’s most impressive statement came in the form of a quotation of Dercon’s concerning the relationship between culture and the digital medium: ‘Collaborate or fail!’
The welcome speeches were followed by the ‘One Minute Madness’ event. Each of the 33 cultural institutions had 60 seconds in which to present their data sets in a way that sparked the interest of the hackers and culture enthusiasts. Some representatives delivered their polished summaries within the time limit but others had to be reined in by the timekeepers and even asked to leave the stage. One memorable incident was the interactive chant between Thomas Köntges of the Open Philology project and the audience: ‘Open!’ – ‘Data!’ - ‘Open!’ – ‘Data!’ The assembled speakers and listeners were of one mind.
The cultural institutions then presented their material to hackers in separate rooms, answering questions. We used the lunch break to talk with participants and learn what they did besides take part in culture hackathons, whether they already had their eye on certain data sets and were working on ideas.
Miri (19, a computer sciences student at the FU, Berlin) and Katharina (23, a student of product design at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee) are interested in the patents of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg. The Archive’s material includes a collection of patents from the early years of industrialisation which provide an excellent window on inventiveness and the challenges facing people in 19th-century Baden-Württemberg. The material comprises approx. 3,500 digitised media. The pair are keen to ‘make the data more easily available. Whether the end result is a game or a web application, we haven’t got around to thinking about that yet. That’ll come at the development stage of the hackathon.’
Chris (30, masters in sociology) currently has a parallel job at a media agency and was asked by a friend to get involved in the project. His friend is an art historian and ‘we share an interest in the history of Berlin and want to see if we can’t look behind the exteriors of Berlin buildings and show people what life looked like back then. We just don’t want the photos and data that exist to be lost from sight forever.’
Philipp, a computer sciences student at the FU Berlin, and Yoonoh, product design at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, are curious about the books of fabric samples from 1830 to 1930 held by the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. Philipp is primarily interested in data processing and an involvement with the image files, but says himself that ‘I have no idea how to get it out to the public in a palatable form. I’m hoping to get some communication going in our work with the designers.’ Yoonoh would like to interpret the data afresh from a designer’s perspective, is looking to come up with new ways of interpreting material with a view to getting to grips with the fabric sample books.
Following on from the cultural institutions it was the participants’ turn to pitch their own ideas in a plenary session, find collaborators and organise themselves in teams. The weekend produced 17 project ideas, which were published on the Hackdash platform. In a marked development from last year a trend can now be seen towards combining digital data and analogue operator devices and output equipment. One idea relates to a crank-mechanism interface for old films. Another interesting idea is being developed by a team around Trier design and communications students Sarah Kirsch and Marcel Kohnz, which wants to feed digitised piano rolls held by the Deutsches Museum into a knitting machine, thereby transforming music into fashion.
Day 2: Workshops, hacking, start of sprint
Sunday kicked off with a group breakfast, with many teams already brainstorming their projects. Programming went on until evening, with participants discussing the first design drafts and wheedling the last secrets of ‘their’ data out of the cultural institutions.
Parallel to this the programme included six 1-hour workshops, which were well attended by participants and which covered the entire life cycle of an app – from initial contact with the data, involvement with interfaces such as the API of the DDB or Wikidata and the processing of metadata using Metafacture to the implementation of applications in hardware projects and impressive visualisations. The programme wound up with a presentation of assistance programmes sponsored by the Federal Government’s Secretary of State for Culture and Media (speaker: Christel Franz) and by the Berlin Senate (speaker: Amelie Müller), along with other sources of advice, all of which suggest ways in which Coding da Vinci teams might pursue their projects with a view to long-term development and implementation.
And that was just the beginning…
The culture hackathon participants now have ten weeks in which to develop, design and programme their projects. Everything produced in this period will then be presented to the public in the Jewish Museum Berlin on Sunday, 5th July, with prizes being awarded to the best projects. We look forward to the results!
Links:
Hackdash: http://hackdash.org/dashboards/cdv15
Website: http://codingdavinci.de/
Photos of launch event on 25th/26th April 2015: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fotos_Kick_Off_25._%26_26.04.2015
Photo credits: Coding da Vinci - der Kulturhackathon. Photographer: Heiko Marquardt - Lizenz CC BY 3.0