GLAMhack 2021: cultural data successfully hacked – a look back
We look back on two intensive hackathon days and a diverse supporting programme. Gain an insight into the online event and the projects that emerged from it.
The Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon, or GLAMhack for short, takes place once a year. It was first held in 2015. This year’s edition on 16 and 17 April 2021 was hosted by the ETH Library and organised as an online-only event in cooperation with the Swiss OpenGLAM Working Group. GLAM institutions – galleries, libraries, archives, museums – provided data sets that served as the basis for diverse and creative hackathon projects.
An online laboratory of creativity
The GLAMhack operates as a temporary creative laboratory. Participants from GLAM institutions and disciplines, such as application development, digital humanities, design or gaming, have just over 30 hours to present their ideas, set up project teams and develop solutions or prototypes, which are then shown to the audience by way of short presentations. Around 75 active hackers submitted 17 creative project ideas from a selection of around 30 challenges at the GLAMhack 2021.
Discover the variety of the submitted external pageprojects and prototypes.
Projects in which the ETH Library or the ETH Library Lab are involved will be pursued further
Two of the challenges taken up originated from the collections and archives of the ETH Library.
- Staff members of the Rare Books and Maps group of the ETH Library focused on a very practical problem of text recognition in the project external pagee-rara: Recognizing Mathematical Formulas and Tables.
- The second challenge was launched by the Image Archive of the ETH Library. This project external pageWikiCommons Metadata Analysis Tool was about comparing image metadata automatically with Wikimedia Commons source material.
Another project, called external pageArchived-Data-Diver, was launched spontaneously on the first day of the hackathon by Barry Sunderland, a technical engineer at the ETH Library Lab. It addresses the problem that viewing large open data sets can be very time-consuming.
These three projects, which received valuable input during the GLAMhack, will be followed up. Attention now turns to finding an appropriate further use for the prototypes developed.
Insights into the multifaceted supporting programme
In addition to the actual hackathon on 16 and 17 April 2021, participants and other individuals interested in GLAM were given an opportunity to take part in various side events.
Check out the video recordings of various programme items linked here:
- 9 April: external pageon-boarding session (general information on the GLAMhack 2021, such as tools, data sets, initial challenge ideas)
- 15 April: external pagepre-event with presentations on the topics “Open Museum – Spanish Flu”, “Graph-Text Reuse in Rare Books” and “Object Recognition/Entity Extraction on Wikimedia Commons”, as well as a panel discussion
- 16 and 17 April: GLAMhack 2021 with welcome, clips of the pitching sessions and all external pagefinal presentations
Project documentation
Despite the time constraints, the GLAMhack project teams managed to document their (interim) results on the website of the external page#GLAMhack2021 challenges and projects. The documentation demonstrates impressively the diverse potential in open cultural data. And last but not least, the projects will serve as inspiration for the #GLAMhack2022.