GLAMhack 2020 – an online success

The 6th edition of the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon, carried out as an online event, took place on 5 and 6 June 2020 and gathered people from all over the world! The teams worked on 15 exciting projects, which are shortly summarized here.

1914 in a Timeline puts newspaper articles from 1914 in relation with media contents of today. The historical articles are drawn from two newspapers from the Romandie (French-speaking part of Switzerland) and can be read either in French or German. Culture in Time is an event calendar using existing linked open data (LOD) on productions, venues and dates to feed both contemporary and historical data into a cultural calendar.

Europa meets Europe is an artistic project that connects the Jupiter moon Europa with the European continent through the help of APIs: random images from the NASA archive are overlaid pixel by pixel with current webcam images… in rhythm with the Jupiter Symphony by Mozart.

Art exhibitions, 1945-2020 visualizes art exhibitions with Switzerland related artists on a map. It allows you to filter by person, by group or solo show or by year. Another type of map is provided by the Swiss Name Chart, displaying the most common family names in a selection of Swiss cities.

Another team working with maps focussed on Georeferencing and linking digitized archival Documents. During the GLAMhack, they analyzed ways of georeferencing a historical map showing the network of Swiss postal connections back in 1851.

SwissAR is a compass, a cultural signpost, a fun tool to help you orientate yourself when you’re outdoors! This web app uses augmented reality to display relevant information about your surroundings.

Interactive Storytelling Across Generations is an educational project which uses old childrens’ drawings for different kinds of digital learning scenarios. It creates a bridge between generations and encourages children to interact and activate their creativity.

MountainHunt and Match with the Mountains are both inspired by images of mountain landscapes in Graubünden provided by the Fundaziun Capauliana for the GLAMhack. While “Mountain Hunt” invites users to search for the mountain depicted on a painting and replicate the same image, “Match with the Mountains” is map displaying the districts of Graubünden and giving an overview of the local mountains.

One team worked on the creation of a Swiss GLAM inventory, comparing existing lists of heritage institutions and defining a model of collaboration between the Swiss National Library and the umbrella associations for each archives, libraries and museums.

Another team analyzed art provenance texts in order to Detect Looted Art. Using red flag names as well as key expressions, the team developed a system to automatically classify and rank art provenance texts according to their “suspiciousness”.

Sir Dridbot Glamhacker is a chatbot which was implemented on Slack, the real time collaboration platform used by the participants during the GLAMhack. You can ask Sir Dridbot Glamhacker for film recommendations or for open data sources.

One team worked on a prototype for the web application Extra Moenia which connects heritage institutions to the outdoors. The user can indicate preferences such as the topic, the distance or the duration of a tour to receive suggestions for outdoor itineraries.

Finally, a team of students in Multimedia Productions at the FHGR Chur gathered video material to produce a #GLAMhack Aftermovie. The film will combine interviews with the participants as well as recordings from the live sessions to document our existing online adventure! Stay tuned for the finished movie!