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What is Data Anyway?
Published: 18th April 2012.
Culture Hack East is an opportunity for arts organisations to share their data, work with talented digital developers and designers, and create new digital prototypes. It is produced by Creative Front with Caper, and funded by Arts Council England.
Culture Hack East will be the sixth Culture Hack, following on from successful events in London, Edinburgh, Leeds and – on 27-28 April – Glasgow. Based on the traditional Hack Day format pioneered by Yahoo!, it’s an opportunity for creative and immersive digital making – a time out from the day-to-day pressure of maintaining a website or managing a catalogue, that encourages creative thinking and experimentation.
In preparation for Culture Hack East, we will be holding a Data Day on 1 May, giving arts organisations a primer on what data is, how they can prepare it and offering some inspiration and showing the kind of things that can be made. Sign up for the Data Day
The developers and designers will be able to make the best things with clean, well-organised and contextualised data. It’s best if you make your data available via an API (Application Programming Interface), but well-organised and available XML or CSV files could be useful too. Find out more at the Data Day and see these examples of Museum APIs that are already available. We will also have a team of expert technical advisers who will be on-hand throughout May and June to help you format your data in the most useful way.
Then, over three days in June, we will be inviting developers, designers, artists, curators and producers the opportunity to work together over 36-hours to make new digital products. These might be websites, apps, games or hardware hacks. Some of them might answer questions the arts organisations have been puzzling for some time, others might be totally new – combining information from several museums, galleries, libraries or theatres with other available data, such as local authority information, maps or information from social networks. Register your interest for Culture Hack East Tickets are free and will be available for developers, designers, artists, producers and subject-matter experts. You will be encouraged to work as part of a multi-disciplinary team, and we will encourage participants to create paper prototypes as well as new digital things.
And don’t worry! This isn’t a security risk. We’re not going to take customer data or expose financial transactions to the world at large. This is about the information that a museum might hold in its Collections Database, a library might have in its Catalogue or a theatre might have buried in years of programmes. It’s about making the most of content to create digital prototype and putting that in a format that is more available to world at large. We hope to encourage more arts organisations to engage with Open Data – it’s about collaborative working and sharing.
There will also be a workshop element and an afternoon session filled with engaging and interesting talks. You don’t have to be technically literate to attend these, but you will need to bring an open mind, be prepared to be inspired and share your ideas.
Contact
Date: 16 -17 June 2012
Venue: Anglia Ruskin University
Watch the Culture Hack London videoculr | See prototypes from previous Culture Hacks: London, Scotland, Leeds | Follow @culturehack on Twitter | Register your interest