Tracks

There are various tracks in the hackathon that represent different ways to approach and work on cultural heritage materials. The purpose of the tracks is to provide starting points for ideas. Works outside the tracks are naturally welcome as well and participants don’t need to confine their projects on only one track.

Art & Design
Data visualisation
Digital Humanities
Digital Storytelling
Education
The Nordic Track
Aalto Fablab
Advanced projects
The Creative Ring Challenge


Art & Design
In this track we embrace chaos, playfulness and silliness. We go beyond all that has been done already or all that would be logical to do to reach the most outlandish. We do hacking in the finest sense of the term: to toy with things in order to get them to do something they are not supposed to do. Heritage is not a sacred cow for us. And “Good art doesn’t have to be nice.” ­ Negativland

Facilitator: Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen

Data visualisation
In this track we look at quantitative aspects of the source material and try to find compelling and clear ways of presenting amounts, locations, time, hierarchies and categories, or several of them. The end results might be simple charts, timelines, maps, network graphs, or any number of other types of visualizations, static or interactive. The purpose is to gain new insights about patterns, structures, distributions, outliers, connections and other interesting and relevant aspects of the data.

Facilitator: Juuso Koponen

Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities is an academic discipline that combines humanities and social sciences research with contemporary communication and information technologies.  Digital Humanities applies computational methods to various types of source materials and data to answer questions about history, language, art, society and cultural change. There is more and more data available that could be used for research. However often the tools and understanding that are needed to draw relevant conclusions are lacking.

We invite you to think and discuss possible research questions based on the datasets and to develop tools that could bring out answers or new types of questions.

Facilitators: Mikko Tolonen, Maija Paavolainen & Eetu Mäkelä

Digital Storytelling
In this track we are looking at ways to play around with the archive material, to see what we can come up with it in three days. We want to challenge you to find interesting stories and create new concepts e.g. in the form of games, interactive websites or films.
Before the hackathon you should take a look at the archives and start to think about how you might want to use the materials. You don’t necessarily have to come with your own idea, but it helps if you have at least thought about how you would answer these 3 questions before the weekend:

  • CONTENT/NARRATION – Which story would you extract or create from the archive material?
  • INTERACTION – How can I present this archive material to make it challenging/interesting/playable/compelling…?
  • PRESENTATION – What kind of audio and visual world would you create around the archive material?

Our goal is to develop tools (interactive websites, films, games, apps etc) that blur the border between storytelling and games using the material provided by the archives.

Facilitator: Leena Närekangas

Education
Digital cultural and historical materials provide new possibilities for educational practices. How then to harness all these great data and visually beautiful images?

  • Creating new educational materials?
  • Building new games for classroom purposes?
  • Educating children on how to act and cope in different media environments?
  • Teaching more about our history and culture?
  • Creating new learning environments?
  • Providing new possibilities for creative activity?

Join us to come up with new ideas, materials and services for education!

Facilitator: Laura Sillanpää

The Nordic Track
This track is focused on the Nordic, in whatever form or approach.
So it is up to you. You can do data mash ups or visualizations to tell stories about similarities or differences in Nordic culture. You could make a gadget or an app that would give you a Nordic perspective on a local collection or public art piece. Either way, form is free and great concepts are as welcome as greatly executed prototypes. As long as you work with Nordic data sets.
In short: Can we tell something new or interesting digitally or by digital means with a Nordic perspective in mind, can we make the international data relevant on site or digitally within a local context and can we possibly have fun while doing it?

Available datasets will be on: Art in the public space and historical collections.

Facilitator: Morten Nybo


Horizontal tracks

 

Aalto Fablab
Technically speaking not a track but a set of tools for digital fabrication at your disposal during the weekend. Turn digital cultural heritage into something tangible at Fablab. During the weekend you can cut and engrave plywood or acrylic, make stickers with the vinyl cutter, use the milling machine to make molds or circuit boards, or print 3D objects. Or use the Fablab electronics studio for DIY electronics and prototyping. Come and play at Aalto Fablab

Facilitator: Neea Laakso

Advanced projects
Have a project that still needs further work? This track is for previously created concepts. Bring your work with you and find new people and fresh ideas.

The Creative Ring Challenge

Great new funding opportunity in Hack4FI – Hack your heritage teams – up to 175 000 Eur available in funding!

The CreatiFI accelerating project organises an horizontal track of FIWARE technologies as a part of the Hack4FI Hack your Heritage -hackathon. If your solution uses FIWARE technology, you can be awarded even up to 50 000 euros to develop your solution.

In this hack CreatiFI helps SMEs and teams to develop their ideas towards a real scalable business with FIWARE open source ready-made technology components. Five winning teams will be awarded with 25 000 – 50 000 euros to develop the ideas further during from three to six months time.

This funding is available for teams working in the creative industries sector. Please note, you can participate in competition even if you are not able to join the hackathon weekend.

FIWARE is an open cloud-based infrastructure for cost-effective creation and delivery of Future Internet applications and services. These APIs are public and royalty-free, driven by the development of an open source reference implementation which accelerates the availability of commercial products and services. More information about FIWARE general enablers and FI-Content media sector components.

Facilitator: Kaisa Sibelius