At this year’s Coding da Vinci culture hackathon awards on December 2nd 2017, two teams won one of the coveted prizes using datasets provided by the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Based on gigapixel scans of insect cases the team “Haxorpoda Collective” developed the application “wOgus” that allows users to sort the cases by color and to modify them individually. They won the prize in the category 'funniest hack'. The second team experimented with 3D scans of snake skeletons. They developed the VR-experience Skelex, which enables to explore the skeletons interactively. With this project the team won the audience award 'everybody's darling'.
As in previous years, programmers, artists, scientists and many other interested people took part in a creative tour de force, where they were given six weeks of immersing themselves in the cultural heritage of numerous German cultural institutions and harnessing it for innovative applications. It was the third time the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin was involved in the event – making a free license for 12 different datasets. These included 3D models of specimens from biological collections, high-resolution photographs of insect cases as well as a wide range of high-quality animal sound recordings. It thus provided the largest number of datasets. Overall, four of 15 project teams made use of selected digital content provided by the Museum.
The involvement in this year’s Coding da Vinci culture hackathon is part of the project Naturkunde 365/24 – Multimediales Applikationslabor des Berliner Naturkundemuseums [natural science 365/24 - multimedia application lab at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin]. The project aims at building a bridge between research and industry, strengthening ties by enhancing collaboration with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the media, tourism and education sectors in the Berlin region. The SMEs are not only given access to expert knowledge, networking and information, they also have exclusive access to the impressive digital knowledge base at the Museum. The aim is to make the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin the first port of call for the development of knowledge-based product and service innovations to benefit nature and society.
For the Museum, the culture hackathon is an ideal and contemporary event format that chimes in with the Museum’s ambition of passing on to society insight gained from research, thus generating value added for society.
The project „Naturkunde 365/24 – Multimediales Applikationslabor des Berliner Naturkundemuseums“ runs until September 2019 and receives funding from the European Regional Development Funds (ERDFäischen Fonds für regionale Entwicklung (EFRE) as well as funding from the Land of Berlin.
Coding da Vinci - the Hackathon on Arts and Cultural Heritage is a cooperation project empowered by Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek (DDB), the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany e.V. (OKF DE), the Servicestelle Digitalisierung Berlin (digiS) and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. (WMDE). It is officially contributing to the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 in Germany (SHARING HERITAGE of Deutschen Nationalkomitees für Denkmalschutz).
