Hack4FI – Hack your heritage 2016 Competition

Press release 18.4.2016

Creative works from open cultural heritage materials awarded

Three projects were awarded for reusing Finnish and Nordic open cultural heritage materials in a Celebration of Open Culture on April 13th 2016.

The celebration marked an end to Hack4FI – Hack your heritage 2016, a hackathon that brought together nearly 100 professionals from various backgrounds. During the hackathon and the following six weeks participants created new information, artworks and service concepts form open archival materials and cultural data. The most creative, interesting and useful ones were awarded during the celebration held in the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland.

The Hack4FI 2016 award  (1.500 euros) went to Dimensions of Art, a visualisation of Danish Art Foundation purchases. The jury was impressed by how the transdisciplinary skills in the group was used to create tangible art out of open data. The result was both aesthetic and informative and political in a way that generates discussion. The same transformation of data into revealing visualisations could be reproduced in e.g. art museums to show how artworks have been collected over time.

A project called Similar Images and Tagging Engine for Cultural Organizations won the Nordic prize. It is a deep learning based tool for image search and metadata creation. According to the jury it offers a lot of possibilities for the reuse of Nordic cultural heritage materials, for collaborations between different parties and for crowdsourcing metadata creation. Similar Images and Tagging Engine for Cultural Organizations will be one of the finalists of the Nordic innovation challenge Hack4Norden and has the opportunity to be presented at Slush 2016. More information on Hack4Norden here.

The audience of the Hack4FI celebration had the chance to vote for their favourite as well. The Crowd favourite prize (500 euros) went to Ye Olde Giffes, a website where people can watch GIFs made from silent movies and create their own short films. According to the audience Ye Olde Giffes offers a funny and easy way for anyone to participate in reusing and creating new meanings for our cultural heritage.

All the works submitted for the Hack4FI – Hack your heritage 2016 competition can be found on the project Hackdash. The competition was part of an AvoinGLAM project funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. The purpose of the project is to promote the creative reuse of open cultural heritage content and data and encourage new collaborations between institutions and makers. Hearty congratulations for all the winners and a warm thank you for all the participants!

Hack4FIvoittajat

 1st Photo: Juulia Juutilainen & Marija Erjavec representing the whole “Dimensions of Art” winner team.
2nd Photo: Timo Heikkinen won the Nordic Prize with his “Similar Images Search and Tagging Engine for Cultural Organizations” project.
3rd Photo: The happy Crowd Favourite “Ye Olde Giffes” team Olga Venger, Ida Immilä & Omar El-Begawy.

More information:
http://hack4.fi/
Laura Sillanpää, project coordinator, laura.sillanpaa@okf.fi
Sanna Marttila, project manager, sanna.marttila@okf.fi