The Coding da Vinci Schleswig-Holstein scholarship projects have been selected

By Philippe Genêt (Coding da Vinci)

All four of the half-yearly scholarship places to be awarded, in each case according to the regional cultural hackathons, have found recipients worthy of them this summer too. The favourites of the jury of experts are the website "Schaufel und Schweiß" (“Shovel and Sweat”) about the construction of the Kiel Canal and the augmented reality application "Historischer Kleiderschrank" (“Historical Wardrobe”).

The great potential of the project Historischer Kleiderschrank already became apparent during the hackathon. As many as three cultural institutions have expressed their interest in the further development and use of the application and have offered their support for its elaboration. The app presents historical garments and gives the viewer the possibility to virtually try on the fashions of times past. Photos suitable for sharing can result from this and thus the target public for the digital exhibits can be extended further.

Schaufel und Schweiß tells the story of the construction of the Kiel Canal from the viewpoint of individual workers. The short reports – written in Standard High German (Hochdeutsch), but which can be listened to in Low German (Plattdeutsch) – are accompanied in each case by a high-resolution, expressive photo and supplementary information. The website has been designed so artistically appealing and textually entertaining that you would like to directly scroll down to the last worker’s narrative. With that said, the plan to optimise the website in such a way that it can be used in school lessons is very realistic.

In each regional hackathon, the three-member jury for selecting the project ideas which can be further developed within the framework of a scholarship is composed of varying experts from the open data and cultural data scene. For Coding da Vinci Schleswig-Holstein 2021 we were able to obtain:

• Etta Grotrian: the historian has held the staff position for the implementation of digital strategy at the Übersee-Museum in Bremen since 2018. For 20 years now, she has been dealing professionally with the digital organisation of knowledge and the digital communication of knowledge in the museum.
• Jens Ohlig: loves knowledge and data. Among other things, he has worked on the project Wikidata for eight years, in order to set up a free knowledge data bank for the sum of the world’s knowledge.

• Alexander Ohrt: founder member of opencampus.sh, accompanies and links inquisitive people who set out to design their own educational paths.

The scholarships run for a period of three months and consist of financial support for living expenses during this time as well as a series of coachings and workshops. The latter serve to provide the scholarship recipients with additional, individually tailored skills and competences for further developing the prototypes resulting from the hackathon.

The Coding da Vinci scholarships are funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) within the framework of the programme Kultur Digital (Digital Culture).