On December 1, the winners of the“Coding Da Vinci Rhein-Main”cultural hackathon were announced in Mainz. The first Coding Da Vinci Rhein-Main came to a close after five weeks with a festive awards ceremony at the Landesmuseum Mainz. Digital projects were honored in a total of five categories for their innovative approaches to making digital treasures from museums, archives, libraries, and collections accessible in new ways. A total of 16 teams successfully participated in the hackathon with their own projects. Many different institutions from across the Rhine-Main region joined forces to organize the hackathon.
One of the creative outcomes of Coding Da Vinci Rhine-Main: a computer game that uses historical war maps from the Hessian State Archives in Marburg. (Photo: Klaus Weber, University Library of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, License: cc by sa 4.0)
Featuring digital data on medieval monsters, films from the World War I era, and historical clothing, the first Coding Da Vinci Rhine-Main in October of this year drew hackers, creatives, and culture enthusiasts from all over Germany to Mainz for the kickoff of the five-week cultural hackathon. On Saturday, December 1, the participants presented their results. The outcome was a wide variety of digital projects that all participants had developed in their free time. Thanks to modern technology, two teams came up with ways to virtually try on historical garments from the collection of the Frankfurt Historical Museum. Another team has made it possible for Alexa, Amazon’s virtual voice assistant, to recount stories from the life of German Emperor Frederick III upon request. All 16 projects were evaluated by a six-member jury of renowned experts in the fields of computer science, design, archival science, and creative coding. Awards were presented in five categories, which evaluated criteria such as creativity and technical implementation. Leander Seige’s web app “Antlitzninja” won awards in two of these categories. The public vote in the “everbodys darling” category ended in a tie, with the web applications “artificApp” by Malgorzata and Piotr Cabaj and “Monstermelodies” by Anett Gesierich and Felix Werthschulte taking the top spots.
The jury: Jeanne Charlotte Vogt (NODE Forum), Verena Kuni (Goethe University Frankfurt), Magnus Pfeffer (HDM Stuttgart), Thomas Just (Vienna State Archives), and Florian Jenett (Mainz University of Applied Sciences) (Photo: Klaus Weber, University Library of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, License: cc by sa 4.0)
The award ceremony was framed by a lecture by the Austrian archivist Mag. Thomas Just, who provocatively asked, “Are you already hacking, or are you still archiving?” In his speech, Just emphasized the importance not only of making digital data from archives, museums, libraries, and collections accessible but also of utilizing it. For State Secretary Prof. Dr. Salvatore Barbaro, this is a central focus of Rhineland-Palatinate’s digital strategy for the state’s cultural institutions. He emphasized that the Coding Da Vinci hackathon is a great opportunity to explore the potential of open cultural data in a playful way.
All projects from the hackathon can be freely used and further developed. An overview of the projects and the data used can be found on the website of Coding Da Vinci, the cultural hackathon.
Coding Da Vinci Rhine-Main was organized by a broad coalition of various institutions and associations in the Rhine-Main region. These include: mainzed—the Mainz Center for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies, the University Library of Mainz, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, the Performing Arts Information Service, the German Digital Library, the Darmstadt University and State Library, the City and Abbey Archives of Aschaffenburg, the Frankfurt Historical Museum, Wikipedia Frankfurt, and the NODE Forum for Digital Arts.
Coding da Vinci - The Culture Hackathon is a joint project of the German Digital Library, the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany e. V., the Berlin Research and Competence Center for Digitization (digiS), and Wikimedia Germany e. V., and an official contribution to the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 in Germany (SHARING HERITAGE).
