The Big-city Tile, Allegories and Sound Visualisations: The Finale of Coding da Vinci
The hackers involved in the Coding da Vinci Culture Hackathon have had ten weeks to develop their ideas using material from 47 data sets received from 33 cultural institutions. Now the jury has the task of deciding which of the exciting projects are to be honoured at the upcoming awards ceremony. The projects will be presented in the Jewish Museum Berlin on Sunday 5th July and all interested parties are warmly invited to attend (Register now!).
One of the projects concerns the ‘Big-City Tile’, which uses data provided by the Central and Regional Library Berlin as part of its initiative for recording metropolitan stories. The tile contains a smartphone which is passed from person to person. Personal stories are recorded on the tile, which sends the tales on to a central platform. The route taken by the Big-City Tile is not prescribed; it is passed from friend to acquaintance, the idea being to collect a multitude of interesting stories.
Another project, ‘Me & Allegory’, is based on the collection of Dutch engravings from around 1600 held at the Hamburg State and University Library. The engravings represent 161 complex allegories, a combination of image and text, similar to the popular internet memes, where a text is superimposed over an image, imbuing it with a new meaning and message. The idea is to explore ‘the pop-culture potential of these 400-year-old engravings using a playful remix of allegories and memes’.
‘Sound Visualisations’ produces visualisations of the piano rolls designed for the Deutsches Museum’s self-playing pianos. ‘In the pre-digital age perforated cards were used in other automated processes. We are familiar with knitting, embroidery and weaving machines. The same process could be used to knit a piece of classical music.’
‘Patents in Motion’, on the other hand, works with 19th-century patent drawings from the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg and uses an interactive process to bring patents for machines and instruments to life on a screen.
A scroll through the projects reveals the sheer wealth of ideas and creative potential for using digitised cultural data sets. And the stage is now set to present this work and honour the inventors on Sunday 5th July in the Jewish Museum Berlin!
The categories, the prizes, the jury & ‘everybody’s darling’
The hackathon retains the five award categories from last year - ‘most technical’, ‘most useful’, ‘best design’, ‘funniest hack’ and ‘out of competition’ – and adds a sixth: the ‘everybody’s darling’ award voted by the audience.
The prizes, all worth around 1,000 euros, include a ‘FabLab Workshop’ on subjects such as hardware and 3D printing, trips to the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, the Chaos Communication Camp at Mildenberg or to Frankfurt for an exclusive tour round the German Film Institute, a specialist workshop on data visualisation and a coaching seminar in ‘Design Thinking’ at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam.
The five-person jury is made up of: Isabella Groegor-Cechowicz from SAP SE, Uwe Müller from the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, Anja Jentzsch from the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, Torsten Koch from the Service Center Digitization Berlin and Tim Moritz Hector from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Details of the awards ceremony
All interested parties are cordially invited to attend the awards ceremony on 5th July. We look forward to welcoming the participants and an audience of enthusiasts from the areas of culture and technology. After the teams have presented their projects the jury will award prizes for the best entries.
When: Sunday 5th July 2015, 10:30 – 16:30
Where: Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstr. 9-14, 10969 Berlin
Programme:
10:30 Doors open
11:00 Welcome address
11:30 Teams’ present their projects
13:45 Questions from the audience / an idea of audience mood
14:00 Jury retires. Snacks
15:40 Awards presented by jury
16:00 Farewells
16:30 End
Press release: 22.06.2015 - Press discussion and awards ceremony ‘Coding da Vinci’ – first German culture hackathon
Website, info, registration: http://codingdavinci.de/
Twitter: @codingdavinci
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Hashtag: #codingdavinci