The word “hackathon” is a blend of the words “hack” (in the sense of exploratory programming) and “marathon”. The hackathon Coding Dürer is modeled after the hackathon Coding Da Vinci organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Wikimedia Germany and others. Its goal is to encourage institutions to liberate their data and bring this data into a creative context from which innovative projects might emerge. Hackathons are often built around industrial or communal data such as traffic data. Coding Da Vinci, on the other hand, expressively puts its focus on cultural data. In 2014, 17 digital cultural projects were realized using 16 datasets.
We need open data. Only if data is available to the public, citizens, scientists, coders are able to use them for ends that no one has thought of before. That entails of course that the resulting data and code is open as well.
We need an open end in the project. There are no limits as to what can be done. There are no restrictions set by the data suppliers as to what should be done. The end of the project is open in order to fuel creativity. No targets are set in order to yield fascinating results.
The purpose of Coding Dürer now is quite similar to Coding Da Vinci: Open data and open-ended. Its focus, however, is on art-historical data and to bring art historians and coders together. What can we do with art-historical data? What insights into art history might we gain? How can data visualizations give us an understanding of art? How can we build meaningful applications upon those data? How can we bring this data into a context never thought of before?
Data sources might be:
- Rijksmuseum’s collection
- Images d’Art: Artworks from French Museums
- Walters Art Museum
- British Museum collection
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Metadata of MoMA’s collection
- Metadata of Tate’s collection
- Images of the Getty Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum
- Getty Thesauri
- and other sources from cultural institutions
We invite interested institutions to join us and take the chance to present their data sources to the interdisciplinary group of 40 people and see what they are able to accomplish within those five days in March and possibly beyond. Please get in contact with us.
The preliminary schedule of the hackathon will be published on this website soon. Please check back in a few days.
Update: The list of data sources is available here.
