Cultural Data Hackathon

In October 2020 Goethe Institut and Credipple host a cultural data hackathon #HackUrCulture to work on new digital engagement ideas for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). This page summarises some of the resources identified with @PolicyActionZA to support this event.

Cultural and heritage data sources in South Africa

We've moved these to a separate working page here.

Examples of cultural and heritage data reuse

There are some examples of what can be done with open cultural data, mostly from the US (but please Tweet us about others if you have seen them).

Map a trip using the New York Public Library (NYPL) Green Book items

Southern Mosaic is a visual story using data from the US Library of Congress

Also by the New York Public Library, a visual grouping of 180,000+ public domain items

The Met has collaborated with Google to enable searching of archives using colour

A visual timeline of the Harvard Art Museum collection

Tools to try

For visualisation, there are many to try out like Flourish and Datawrapper. If you're more technical and using Python or R, have a look at this summary of libraries.

Have a look at these storytelling tools from Knightlab including Timeline, StoryMap, Soundcite and Juxtapose.

For mapping relationships or networks as a story try GraphCommons, see this example of three musicians in a recording ecosystem. Kumu is also popular for network visualisation.

For mapping, something like Kepler is easier to use. For more detail on working with spatial data see this page.

If you want to get data tables out of PDFs you can try Tabula. OpenRefine is good for cleaning data.

If you want to analyse text in books or articles (e.g. to identify people and places) there are lots of tools to try like TextRazor, Intellexer and Google's Natural Language.