On Saturday, October 27, the Coding Da Vinci Rhein-Main cultural hackathon kicked off with a grand opening event in Mainz, organized by mainzed and the Mainz University Library, among others. More than 100 participants ensured that, by the end of the idea pitch session, there were 22 proposals calling for participation. The teams that emerged from this process now have five weeks—until December 1—to develop their project ideas for new ways to utilize digital cultural heritage. On December 1, the results will be presented to the public at the Landesmuseum Mainz, and the best teams will be awarded prizes.
At the kick-off event in the Alte Mensa at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, museums, archives, libraries, collections, and research institutes from all over Germany contributed digital data. i3mainz also provided a dataset containing photos, documents, texts, and coordinates related to Mainz’s Stolpersteine. Timo Homburg and Nicole Bruhn had compiled this data with the active support of Hedwig Brüchert and Renate Knigge-Tesche from the Verein für Sozialgeschichte Mainz e.V. (Mainz Association for Social History). Prior to many Stolperstein installations in Mainz, the association researches the historical facts about the individuals in question, contacts surviving relatives, and collects photos and documents. “It’s very important to me that we breathe life into the Stolpersteine in this way,” said Knigge-Tesche.
Franz Conradi, Renate Knigge-Tesche, Nicole Bruhn, and Timo Homburg with the Stolpersteine dataset; photo: Matthias Dufner, CC BY-SA 4.0
Incidentally, the Wikipedia list of Stolpersteine in Mainz was compiled by 78-year-old Mainz retiree Franz Conradi. He has gathered photos under open licenses, information, and the coordinates of the stones, which serve as another important source for i3mainz.
By participating in Coding Da Vinci, i3mainz hopes to gain new insights into processing location-based data in combination with approaches from the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. These topics are at the heart of several research projects at i3mainz.
A group of IT systems engineering students from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam made a special trip to attend. They are repeat participants in Coding Da Vinci and have become friends through the event. At Coding Da Vinci in Leipzig, they won the award for Best Design. “I always thought it was a shame that culture was so dry in school. Through digitalization, I’ve gained a new perspective on it,” said 23-year-old Jonas Bounama.
Students from Potsdam with Jonas Bounama (3rd from left), Photo: Matthias Dufner, CC BY-SA 4.0
There was also plenty to hear from i3mainz on Sunday: an input session by Pascal Neis focused on OpenStreetMap’s use in Coding Da Vinci, while another by Timo Homburg provided insights into Wikidata and the Semantic Web.
From the organizers’ perspective, the large number of participating cultural institutions, the wide variety of data, and especially the large number of participants represent a major success. Joachim Kemper (44) from the City and Abbey Archives of Aschaffenburg helped organize the event and is eagerly looking forward to the awards ceremony: “Cultural heritage institutions are like parachutes: they’ve only fulfilled their purpose once they’ve opened.”
” Coding da Vinci—The Culture Hackathon is an official contribution to the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 in Germany.
