Fwd: Culture Hack Day
Kevin Flanagan
From: Kevin Flanagan <kev.fl...@gmail.com>
Date: 16 February 2011 03:50
Subject: Culture Hack Day
To: 091labs...@googlegroups.com, limerick-h...@googlegroups.com
Hello,
The idea of an Irish Culture Hackday based on http://culturehackday.org.uk
took off spontaneously on twitter yesterday and there is great enthusiasm about it.
If your interested in working with artists on Remixing Cultural Data join in the conversation
http://culturehackie.posterous.com
Kevin
From: Culture Hack Day IE <post-aqGFI...@culturehackie.posterous.com>
Date: 16 February 2011 03:34
Subject: [culturehackie] Warning serious brain dump
To: kev.fl...@gmail.com
Howdy folks,
My name is Kevin Flanagan I'm an artist of sorts. I'm a member of http://091labs.com a hackerspace in Galway. Currently involved in a partnership between 091Labs & DERI Digital Enterprise Research Institute NUIG in organising an Open Data Hackday which is happening this Saturday in Galway as part of Engineers Week.
http://091labs.com/2011/02/open-data-hack-day-this-sat-feb-19th/
Its great to see so many people inspired and interested in making #CulturehackIE happen. If any of you are going to be around Galway this weekend you are very welcome to come along and knock heads with some techies about cultural data.
I know a number of artists on the list here are interested in promoting Free Culture. #CultureHackIE touches on so many issues at the heart of the Free Culture movement. As Free Culture in Ireland is still very much in its infancy I would like to suggest running #CulturehackIE as a Free Culture Ireland event.
For those wondering what I'm on about and to put you at ease Free Culture Ireland has no fromal organisation it is really just a loose network of artists which includes Alan, Scott myself and a few others. We have a twitter account and a mailing list for FC related news and discussion http://twitter.com/saorcultureire https://groups.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!forum/free-culture-ireland
I would really like for this to be the very first Saor Cultur Eire event but I also recognise that the idea for CulturehackIE has evolved here quite naturally so if people prefer to stick with it as it is I will respect that too.
To add to this conversation I'd like to start by listing a few things useful resources and tools etc Ive come across. Please comment and add to this where you can.
Rob Myers is doing some interesting work on Art Data -
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/01/art-open-data/
Identifying Datasets
When you identify datasets its good to register them on http://ie.ckan.net
CKAN is an international open registry for datasets and is very useful if you are interested in mashing up different datasets .
So what Irish cultural data is available? What institutions collect data on Irish cultural life?
We should contact NIVAL and invite them to participate by bringning along some datasets on Irish Art http://nival.ncad.ie/databases.htm
National Gallery http://doras.nationalgallery.ie/
IMMA http://www.imma.ie/en/collection_search.cgi
This is a short list just for example and I'm sure there are many more that would be great to list.
The point in this exercise for me is so that we can identify obstacles to access and usability of culture and cultural data. Wouldn't it be nice to do 1 search on an Irish artist that would list all works across multiple collections.
Copyright, Orphan Works and the Public Domain
Copyright is a major issue for libraries and archives that places real legal constraints on what they can include in online archives. There is also the issue of Orphan Works that is art works that are forgotten about or where the copyright owner cannot be contacted so that the works are left in a legal limbo with regards as to who can have access to them. Also the public domain it would be great to have a central repository or reference for Irish artistic works that are in the Public Domain.
http://www.publicdomainworks.net/search?q=Ireland&Search+%C2%BB=search
http://creativecommons.org/affiliates/ie/ I would really like to see Creative Commons Ireland involved in these events but have had trouble getting a response from them in the past and cant say I have any idea about what they are doing.
In relation to legal issues I know that Eoin O Dell of http://www.cearta.ie/ and TJ McIntyre http://www.tjmcintyre.com/ are both very interested in the digital cultural domain.
Funding Data -
Arts Council http://www.artscouncil.ie/en/we_funded.aspx
So at a previous Hackathon I asked some coders to build a scraper to scrape the funding database from the arts councils web site.
The scraper is built with a very useful tool called Scraperwiki which allows coders to code Ruby Python or PHP directly into the browser and to make that code as easy to edit as a wikipedia entry. The Scraper has been having some problems and is in need of repair.
http://scraperwiki.com/scrapers/galway-arts-council
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aju6C2vCJrTNdEg5ZS1TOXZEVnMyOC1KbVdWREdYY3c&hl=en
This dataset also needs some tidying up before it can be made useful I highly reccomend using Googles Fusion Tables and Google Refine.
http://www.google.com/fusiontables/
https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
You might be more familiar with Hans Rosling and Gapminder http://www.gapminder.org/
His recent BBC documentary - 'The Joy of Stats' is really very good http://www.gapminder.org/videos/the-joy-of-stats/
I would like to see a tool which aggregates funding from different cultural bodies Arts Council, Film Board, Culture Ireland, City & County Councils etc so that when we search for any particular organisation we can see all of the funding the organisation has received. I'm also interested in mapping funding data geographically and identitfying cultural blackspots places that are neglected.
Maybe we could use it to make a nice visualisation like http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/Artsfunding/Fundingamountinteractive
Gavin Sheridan and others at TheStory.ie have been doing trojan work in making FOI requests for expenses data from Government departments. The first datadump he was able to get his hands on was for the Department for Arts Sport and Tourism and might be of interest for those looking for a challenge http://thestory.ie/2010/03/12/departments-expenses-database/
Something else I would like to see is the City and County arts Offices publishing their funding data to do some compartitive studies on performance of different arts offices. Perhaps if we had an artist from each of the 26 counties to make individual FOI requsts for that data.
We really want to explore visualisation as part of this event too.
OK its 3:28 AM and time for BED
Gnight
K
https://twitter.com/flanagankev
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