MW2012 Hackathon

Weaving and hacking museums and the web

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Epic!

The Museums and the Web conference is over, and we managed to get three awesome projects online! At the closing plenary Hein presented our outcomes:

MuseumOrNot.com A playful game where you see two pictures; one from a museum collection API and another one from some other mysterious interwebs spot. As player you choose which of the pictures is actually in a museum. When you answer right, you gain credits so you can rise up to the level of Spinny Bar Trustee or Art Handler!

Museumify.com Ever wonder how'd you look if you were in a museum? Pick your image from the internet and input it in the museumifyer; it'll overlay your face on the face of an actual piece of art!

Synesthesia A music player for museum haters! Play tracks and corresponding pieces of art slide by, stealth mode.

Collection Colours A nearly-finished side-project to output color frequency in art objects over time. So which colors were "hot" during wars, etc

Enjoy the projects and untill next year!!

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Museumifyme

Something cool @lukasvan3l has been working on today.

Upload an image of yourself to get museumified!

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Synesthesia

Aim of this project is to put “museumhaters” into touch with objects from museumcollections by making use of their musical preferences. To accomplish this the Synthesthesia team is trying to build an application in the form of a music player that will “read” the lyrics of the song that you play and then show you related content to that specific song. First problem they ran into so far is the fact that they are dealing with a lot of copyright protected material, making it very difficult to find good sources for song lyrics that have an API.

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Tastemaker tour

The initial concept was to create curators out of highly influential Twitter users such as Lady Gaga, Stephen Fry, Paulo Coelho etc. showing related artworks to their tweets. But it didn’t take too long before we found out they hardly ever tweeted about art, stopping us dead in our tracks and taking us back to the drawing board.... Sneak preview of what the tastemaker team is working on can be found at: 1.tastemakerascurator.appspot.com Could be that it only works in Chrome for now, sorry about that... 

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Best idea we've seen so far...

"Let's forget about museums for a while…"

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Museum nerds at work...

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Here's the short presentation @karsveling and @PaulvanFabrique did this morning to get the hackathon workshop going.

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Looks like in one of the projects we will be working on over the next few days we will be mashing up museum collection data with music, so here's a useful list of resources...

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I can't help it, here's one more :)

The Mashificator displays a carousel of images about the tekst you are reading. Try it out with this website! (click and wait, it can take a while!) You can use a bookmarklet to do this same thing on any site you are visiting.

So next time you're reading the online New York Times, check to see if there's interesting pieces of art surrounding the article!

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Owkay, one more nice API usage example before we start off tomorrow!

One of the bits of information that's available via some musea is the size of it's objects. So Hay Kranen took this information and created a page that shows you the collection of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, to scale!

Now you can really appreciate the size of the huge paintings, and the precision of the miniatures. Enjoy :)

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You've found the steve tagger, a place where you can help museums describe their collections by applying keywords, or tags, to objects. You can also use the tagger application to browse objects or tags

Another really interesting project out there, focussing on expanding cultural collections with human-generated tags. This way, museums are being rewarded for opening up their collections via an API; their content is enriched with content that only humans can provide!

Steve Tagger has it's own API so we can search it's entire collection for images with the tag "intimate" and come up with this handsome guy :)

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Using facial recognition technique, AB-C media created a collage of faces of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. It really gives the museum a face!

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Of course others have done this before; here's a prototype built in the pre-museum-API era 2008 (!)

"hoard.it is a prototype system for scraping granular, semantic data from existing (template-driven) HTML pages."

It's aggregated some 70.000 objects and shows some interesting statistics about them, like date and location. Also, you can search through all collections simulaneously.

Back in 2008 it wasn't easy to aggregate this information. Now, however, musea are opening up their collections with all the rich data that they have. This opens up a lot of possibilities, as we're hoping to show you coming MW2012!

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API listings

First thing to do is look around for interesting Museum API's. And there's quite a lot of them, too! Luckily some other sites have already published lists of these:

The most relevant API listing is that of museum-api.pbworks.com;

ProgrammableWeb.com describes amongst others the Amsterdam Museum, Brooklyn Museum, British Museum, Museum Victoria, Victoria & Albert Museum;

Kasabi.com contains an abundance of API's, from the "government art collection" to "english heritage" and "new york times";

My God, look at the collections assembled at Europeana.eu! Viewable by timeline and by map... I've requested an API key specifically for the conference, hopefully it'll be in on time.

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Weaving and hacking collections

At the Museums and the Web 2008 conference there was a call for more open data and API's for museum data, especially collections. A quote: "MW08 might well be a historic turning point for the sector in terms of data interoperability and experimentation"

Now, at MW2012, we're going to have a look at how open the musea's collections have gotten. And we'll use that open data to create something unique. A mash-up of different collections, combined with other API's from a totally different nature. Combine Brooklyn Museum with New York Times, or Powerhouse with Last.FM. Think out of the box :)

We'd love it if you joined us at the conference. The kick-off brainstorm will be a workshop on wednesday morning, after that we start creating. We'll be weaving and hacking untill saturday afternoon, when we'll present the final result at the MW2012 closing session. We'd love it if you'll contribute!

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hello world

:)