A half-day data hackathon at #MCN2017.
Many institutions have been releasing their collections on GitHub and sharing APIs over the last few years.
During this half-day hackathon, museum professionals are invited to get their hands on real-life datasets from other museums and share their experience dealing with open data.
Although it takes place on workshop day, it isn't a workshop: there isn't just one workshop leader.
Instead, everybody is bringing something and learning from the others: sharing tips and techniques, working with datasets, text-mining, data-mining and dataviz tools to produce a few stunning presentations by the end of the day.
Some results could be presented in a session later during the conference.
- Evaluation: What can your data tell you about your visitors and your collection? How can this feed your digital strategy?
- Data-led storytelling: Can data help you decide where to focus your interpretation efforts?
- Data-backed storytelling: How can data not lead but strengthen and support your narratives?
- Accessibility: How can you increase accessibility with big data and machine learning?
- Strategy: What do you get from "opening" your collection? Feedback from institutions that have just done it.
The hackathon will start with series of short lightning talks where participants present tools or techniques they use, and how they use them, to feed the discussion. Then participants will form groups and choose to apply some of these tools and techniques to a dataset.
One of the principles of data science is that it has to be reproducible. So, one outcome could be to share a repository of tools on GitHub. A data toolkit that can be applied to "any" museum dataset.
Please refer to the hackathon repository on GitHub for the latest list of people who have expressed interest in taking part.