Coding da Vinci Lower Saxony 2020 ended with the award ceremony on 29 January 2021. The detailed final report on the project is now available for download. It contains a detailed review of the "Coding da Vinci Lower Saxony 2020" cultural hackathon and a summary of the results.
Coding da Vinci Niedersachsen 2020 – positive conclusion and lessons learned
Over a period of 14 weeks – after the kick-off on 24 and 25 October 2020 – people interested in culture, technology, design and games were called upon to creatively develop something new from open data from cultural and research institutions. The collections of digital sound and video recordings, images and metadata were to be transformed into applications that can be used in culture and society. The project teams implemented their ideas during the hackathon and apps, websites and other digital formats were created that can be freely used and reused for their own purposes.
At the end of the sprint phase, there were ten project ideas that were presented at the award ceremony on 29 January 2021. At the award ceremony, which took place online for corona reasons, the four winning projects were finally selected.
The winners
The potential of open cultural data was demonstrated by the project teams to the 250 participants with their impressive results from the past 14 hackathon weeks.
The five-member jury, consisting of experts from the open science, culture and tech sectors, awarded three prizes in three different categories:
- Appsolutly Old in the category "Funniest Hack": What apps would people have used 70 to 100 years ago to find out about current events? And what content within social networks would have been shared back then? To visualise this idea, Appsolutly Old revives historical datasets by processing them and adapting them to current communication.
- Maschinenlerner in the category "Most Useful": Teaching the basics of machine learning using Coding da Vinci data.
- FabSeal in the category "Best Design": The web application FabSeal brings one of over 1,000 lacquer seals from the collection of Paul Arnold Grun back to life by automatically generating a 3D model from the 2D photos of the seals.
The audience chose the 4th winner in an online vote in which more than 220 people participated:
- Herzog VR August in the category "Everybody's Darling": the project brings the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel virtually to life. A small part of the valuable permanent collection is made accessible in a virtual walk-through model of the Augusteerhalle, with a focus on interaction with rare and sometimes extremely precious manuscripts. Among them are the six book wheel catalogue volumes including an interactive book wheel.
Coding da Vinci – The Culture Hackathon is a joint project of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), the Forschungs- und Kompetenzzentrum Digitalisierung Berlin (digiS), the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and Wikimedia Deutschland.
More information on Coding Da Vinci Lower Saxony 2020 and the award ceremony
