‘Coding da Vinci’ Culture Hackathon 2015: institutions and programmers gear up for data hack.
In the words of Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek General Manager Frank Frischmuth: ‘Culture and the digital medium feed off one another’, and so it goes: preparations are underway for Coding da Vinci 2015. On 25th and 26th April cultural institutions, hackers and designers will converge for the first time on the premises of Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin with a view to presenting data, pitching ideas and setting the culture hackathon ball rolling.
The idea of demonstrating the multiplicity of ways in which open data can be used and showing how productive it can be to look outside one’s own discipline has proven its worth and revealed the huge potential of cultural data for digital applications. On the back of this success the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek is, for the second time, joining forces with the Service Center Digitization Berlin (digiS), the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland (OKFN) and Wikimedia Deutschland to host the culture hackathon.
Coding da Vinci got off to a great start last year: 16 cultural institutions produced a total of 26 data sets – images, sounds, maps, videos and metadata – and released them for unrestricted use under open licence. In the end 17 applications were unveiled at a public event. They included ‘Old Berlin’, a project presenting the architectural development of Berlin, ‘inside 19xx’, which visualises books banned by the National Socialists between 1938 and 1941, and ‘zzZwitscherwecker’, which only stops ‘ringing’ when users have correctly guessed the identity of the warbling bird.
A look back at Coding da Vinci 2014
The participating cultural institutions and their data sets
32 institutions representing a wide range of cultural fields are providing material this year. Speyer’s municipal archives are making photographs from the two world wars available, the Bavarian State Library is providing the Joint Union Catalogue of the libraries of Bavaria, Berlin and Brandenburg and its 22 million (!) units of metadata, and the Berlinische Galerie is contributing two whole collections of material, one focusing on the Berlin Secession, the other on correspondence between Dada artists.
The Herbarium Berolinense of the Botanical Gardens & Botanical Museum Berlin is providing images of 3.6 million dried and preserved plants. The German National Library is offering three sets of material: the Integrated Authority File (GND) with approx. 10 million datasets, the 1914-1918 war collection of the Deutsche Bücherei in the ‘First World War collection’ and an assemblage entitled ‘Leipzig: topography of a booming city of literature, 1913’.
The Deutsches Museum is inputting over 3,000 piano rolls from autopianos, including original recordings of Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg and Richard Strauss. Aside from museums, archives and libraries this year’s project also involves theatres - the GRIPS Theater Berlin and the International Theatre Institute (ITI) Germany, both of which are providing drawings and video collections.
Other fine ensembles of material are coming from the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the Hamburg State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Foundation, the Stadtmuseum Berlin Foundation and the library of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Veikkos Archive, the Computerspielemuseum, the SLUB Dresden and the Central and Regional Library Berlin.
Key facts
Project duration: 25th April – 5th July 2015, Berlin
Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th April – Data presentation, idea development and hacking; venue: Wikimedia Deutschland (Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24, 10963 Berlin)
Sprint: Working on project, online phase
Sunday 5th July: public awards ceremony; venue to be announced on codingdavinci.de
Programme
Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th April 2015
The event will begin with the cultural institutions presenting their data in BarCamp format, where anyone can hold his or her own workshop, talk or panel discussion. The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Wikidata present their data and APIs.
Challenges will be presented, giving participants initial ideas for their projects. Teams materialise and go to work on the open data. A range of workshops will provide further information and inspiration. The organisers invite all interested individuals to register on the website and take part in the culture hackathon! A limited number of travel and accommodation grants are available.
Ten-week sprint
During the sprint the teams have ten weeks in which to develop their projects jointly with the cultural institutions that have provided the data, to link them with additional data sets and make them comprehensible and visually interesting.
Sunday 5th July 2015
Everyone is invited to attend the public awards ceremony on 5th July. We look forward to meeting participants and members of the public from the fields of culture and technology in person. After the teams have presented their projects a jury will award prizes for the best projects.
Website, info, registration: http://codingdavinci.de/
Twitter: @codingdavinci
@ddbkultur
Hash tag: #codingdavinci