Coding da Vinci 2017: We still need many more hackathons!

By Wiebke Hauschildt (Online Editor)



“It doesn’t matter who wins. We’ve all benefited from the last six weeks.” Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, Programme Director of the Jüdisches Museum Berlin (Jewish Museum Berlin), concluded her welcoming address to the participants in the Coding Da Vinci prize-giving ceremony on 2nd December 2017 with these words. More than 200 cultural hackers and culture enthusiasts, employees of cultural institutions and the press came together in the Jewish Museum Berlin on this Saturday to experience the finished projects and the prize-giving ceremony six weeks after the kick-off weekend of Coding da Vinci. 



Klaus Lederer, Senator for Culture and Europe in Berlin, was there and he emphasised the great value of what is created “when cultural heritage is digitised as a first step and made “openly” available as a second step, so that people can do things with it”. Lederer was delighted that cultural institutions are aware, “that they are part of a superior treasure trove of cultural heritage which needs to be linked together”. He appealed, “By all means, please continue. We still need many more hackathons, we still need many more digitisation projects!”

Fifteen projects have emerged from a total of 30 data sets from 19 cultural institutions in Berlin, Brandenburg and Leipzig and these were presented by their young teams. The range could not have been more different; the quality of all the apps, websites and ideas developed, however, is of the same high quality. Whether it is the app “Recycled paper – messages from days long past”, which accesses the digitised historical newspapers of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) and brings the most exciting and bizarre newspaper stories from the beginning of the 20th century onto smartphones – and which is already available to be downloaded in the play store. Or the online game “Bombus”, which is based on Bertuch’s “Bilderbuch für Kinder” (picture book for children) from the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung (Research Library for the History of Education) and which addresses the dramatic decline in bumblebees over the past years: the player is the bumblebee and has to take on pollination tasks without being hit by insect killers, otherwise it is “ game over”. Up to “historical ticket matching”, which has become a genuine and really lovely matching game based on 120,000 digitised historical tickets from the historical archives of the Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum(German Museum of Technology Foundation) Berlin.

The winners: snake skeletons, colourful beetles and marbles of remembrance

This year there were six categories again in which the projects could win prizes and at 5 pm the time had come: the jury had made their decision and the votes for the audience prize “everybody’s darling” had also been counted. The winners were announced with much cheering and applause and asked to come up onto the stage.



The winner in the category “most technical” was the project “Berliner MauAR”  which lets the Berlin Wall re-appear and be experienced at the original locations by means of a mobile app. The online game “Bertuchs Bilderspiel” (Bertuch’s picture game) won in the category “best design”: the jury praised the affectionate realisation and transfer of these old drawings for children into a game , in which the players create an individual story which can be printed afterwards as a book in physical form.

The “funniest hack” was achieved by the “Haxorpoda Collective” project : the user can, among other things, design his/her own insect box, sorted according to colour and print it as a high-resolution photo. On the basis of the data from the Naturkundemuseum (Natural History Museum) Berlin, you can thus compile your very own collection of insects. There was much laughter during the presentation of this project when one of the developers commented on his technical solution that it had been helpful that he had developed a machine for sorting M&Ms sometime ago.

 

The category “most useful” was won by the website  “Exploring the Hidden Kosmos”  which, on the one hand, makes it possible to read and compare the transcripts of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos lectures by means of a tool and, on the other hand, invites the visitors to the website to explore the individual lecture topics in a playful way. The prize in the category “out of competition” was won by the project “Marbles of Remembrance/Murmeln der Erinnerung” , which has programmed a chatbot to help you to follow the trail of Jewish children who lived and went to school in Berlin during the Nazi regime 1933-1945.



The audience was also allowed to select a favourite – the project “Skelex”, in which skeletons of snake heads from the Naturkundemuseum can be experienced in an immersive manner with a Virtual Reality application became “everybody’s darling”. A special feature of the application: if you like, you can transform yourself into a mouse and let yourself be eaten by a snake head.



Congratulations to all cultural hackers for their fantastic projects and we would like to thank all participants for their great commitment and the wonderful results!

The Future of Coding da Vinci

The cultural heritage year “Sharing Heritage” 2018 begins already in April with Coding da Vinci Ost in Leipzig, organised by the Library of the Year 2017, the Leipzig University Library. The cultural hackathon “Rhein-Main” or – as the current working title is – “Coding da Vinci meets Gutenberg”, since the hackathon will take place at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz – is also under preparation for October 2018.



We look forward to next year and we conclude with the words of Klaus Lederer: “We still need many more hackathons!”

 

Coding da Vinci – The cultural hackathon is a collaboration project of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB), the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany e.V. (OKF DE), the Servicestelle Digitalisierung (Service Centre Digitalisation) Berlin (digiS) and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. (WMDE) and an official contribution to the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018 in Germany.