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

Navigating the Green Book at NYPL

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

Southern Mosaic visualisation of artist locations and titles

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.

Additional reading

Exploring Arts Engagement with (Open) Data by Tim Davies

Open cultural data: Curating GLAM in the digital age in the Jakarta Post

Data as Culture with ODI

A Nerd’s Guide To The 2,229 Paintings At MoMA and the data on Github

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Open Data: A Case Study in the Harvard Art Museums’ API by Harvard Art Museum

A list of 'Cool stuff made with cultural heritage APIs'

120kMoMA - A data visualization study of The Museum of Modern Art collection dataset of 123,919 records

Using Public Domain Materials in the Classroom by New York Public Library

Blog on how people have used MoMA’s data so far