This weekend I was at Culture Hack Day, where teams of developers came together to create things using data from cultural organisations (it had nothing to do with breaking into computers and nicking personal info – that’s different).
There were a fair few people from Birmingham who went along and they had access to a week’s worth of West Midlands listings data provided by Global Data Point, which Marketing Birmingham had a hand in arranging, so here’s a list of the kind of things they made.
Mark James and Andrew Lowther from Made Media made a few things:
- LuvvieScore highlights cultural hotspots in UK (well, just Birmingham at the moment). CiB’s office rates as an ‘A-List Badger Fossil’, happily
- TescoFresco maps the location of theatres and branches of Tescos (pic below with theatres in red, Tescos in blue)
- Following a request, they did the same thing with Tescos and libraries
Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made Pepys’ Shows, featuring the extracts from Samuel Pepys’ diaries where he reviews trips to the theatre.
Stef Lewandowski (previously from around these parts, so he’s allowed it in this round-up) was busy too:
- He simplified access to 1m+ artifacts in the Culture Grid API by providing Ruby access (ruby gem here)
- In case it wasn’t obvious, he then made a mobile app to show what that means
- And finally he was involved in Filmflexicon which cross-references on-demand films and rating from Rotten Tomatoes
The full list of hacks, which included a service that uses Foursquare check-ins to work out when galleries and museums are at their busiest and Subvertle – a framework for playing with iPlayer subtitles, should be on the Culture Hack Day website later.
On the Saturday there were some talks too. If you’re interested in what all that was about then I’ve written up quite a few notes on the Meshed Media website.
(* yes, so it should have been Culture Hack Weekend)