Technologists and Developers Join Forces to Build Beautiful Things with London’s Cultural Data
Culture Hack Day wrapped up in London yesterday, ending a weekend spent discussing, brainstorming, and creating uses for open cultural and creative arts data.
Mixing developers, creative technologists, and cultural institutions, the event brought together a group of people eager to do more with data from the art world. Produced by the Royal Opera House and housed at Wieden + Kennedy’s London space, the weekend included a session of lightening talks, a plethora of creative data, and lots of brainstorming.
The Ignite-style lightening talks featured ideas from a variety of interesting people, including Google/Youtube Europe’s Creative Director, Tom Uglow, BERG’s Creative Technologist, Tom Armitage, and iShed’s Director, Clare Reddington. Presenters stirred up questions and ideas around whether consumers prefer to engage with art in person or in digital forms, what might happen if an audience had access to the metadata from visual media, and whether technologies should just get out of the way of art entirely.
Hack sessions produced a variety of prototype apps for finding and exploring cultural data from the London area. Dan W harvested check-in data from Foursquare to create “When Should I Visit?” an app for showing the least busy times to attend galleries, museums, and theaters around London. Andrew Lowther and Mark James made “LuvvieScore,” an interactive infographic that lets the user input a zipcode and get back a swarm of the shows, performances, films, and exhibits in the area. Stef Lewandowski took data from the UK’s CultureGrid API (including metadata on books, videos, paintings, photos, and more) to put together a CultureGrid app for mobile phones. After the hack weekend, participants shared their apps and winners were chosen in a variety of categories.
To check out more of the discussion around Culture Hack Day, follow @culturehackday or #chd11.
Via Roo Reynolds, Mia Ridge, and Meshed Media.
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