Museum Hackathon: digging into museum data sets

Museum Hackathon: digging into museum data sets

This digital humanities hackathon is focused on visualising museum data and making it accessible. This joint event brings together students and practitioners from the Media Centre and the Chair of Didactics of Computer Sciences of the TU Dresden (Germany), the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and several museums and heritage institutions in London and Dresden. This hackathon is kindly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. 

In several small, international groups the participants will develop useful, usable and good-looking software projects which have a potential for further development. These software projects will look at using existing data sets and making them accessible to the public or museum staff. We are also open to other innovative approaches to making use of the data sets. 

If you are interested in certain topics or specific data sets, please let us know beforehand (email lucy.stagg@ucl.ac.uk)  so we can do our best to facilitate that. We also welcome proposals to utilise certain hardware (e.g., for VR applications). If you’d like to bring along hardware requiring special arrangements, please talk to us beforehand.

Image © UCL Digital Media, 2018

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Schedule

Wednesday 7 November 2018: Input and concept creation

Registration 9.30, Tea and coffee (provided)

Morning (10 to 12): Input

• opening message
• presentation of problems and data sets by the museum/institution partners
• if applicable: presentation of initial ideas and/or specific hardware by the participants
• team formation (3 to 5 people per team)

Lunch (not provided but there are many places to eat both in and around UCL)

Afternoon (2 to 5): Preparation and mock-ups

• theoretical preparation (requirements, software flow: user stories and use cases)
• creation of initial mock-ups and first code snippets

Evening (5:30 to 6:30): Presentation and feedback

• presentation of day 1 results
• internal feedback from the other groups

Thursday, 8 November 2018: Implementation

Tea and coffee (provided)

Morning (10 to 12): Development

• software development

Lunch (not provided)

Afternoon (2 to 5): Development

• internal tests (project is tested by team members and members of the other groups)
• iterative further development

Evening (5:30 to 6:30): Presentation and feedback

• presentation of day 2 results
• internal feedback from the other groups

Friday, 9 Nov 2018: Completion and reworking

Tea and coffee (provided)

Morning (10 to 12): Development and presentation

• preparation for presentation
• 11 to 12: presentation of results to the museum partners

Lunch (not provided)

Afternoon (2 to 4:30): Clean-up, documentation, publishing

• reworking (code clean-up)
• code documentation
• publication of code and documentation

Evening (5 to 6): Awards

• jury decision and awards ceremony
• farewell message