Mobilizing Historical Geodata: Agenda And Schedule
David Riordan
MOBILIZING HISTORIC GEODATA: HACK NYC’S PAST WITH NYPL LABS
June 4-5 | The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, The Bindery
Yay - you’re coming to hack and mobilize historical geodata with us next week! We’re excited you’re coming!
Before this shindig gets underway, we’ve got a few things to take care of.
Agenda
While we don’t want to dictate what we end up working on over these two days, it seems prudent for us to organize into sub-tracks so we can efficiently work together, in small teams on discrete projects that we all can lovingly bring into this world. We’ve got some ideas of what we can build - that’s coming today - but we also want you to bring your ideas to the table.
Mobilizing Historic Geodata will be taking place over two days in “The Bindery”: the shared workspace of NYPL Labs and NYPL Technology’s Repository Team in The Library’s landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. It’s a former preservation laboratory that looks like your high school chemistry classroom’s been occupied by a startup in the heart of The Library.
We also realized that most of us both want to hack & yack, and that while hacking requires focus and directed space, it also requires exposure to broad stroke ideas by way of yacking.
We’ll be pursuing the hack and the yack - the yin and yang of hackathons - together. We hope everyone will join a project team and work toward building something, as well as participate in the side-discussions throughout. We’ll be offering several slots for people wanting to spur discussion around specific topics and expect side conversations to pop up throughout the two days.
There will be a few speakers over lunch on both days, and we’ll be offering several hours for structured yacking each day so people can plan how to balance their time between conversation and creation. We’ll have signups for slots every half hour in the afternoons for Structured Yacking, topical discussions of your fancy as you’ve seen at just about every unconference ever. And of course, we anticipate Unstructured Yacking to happen as it will and we’ll have an area set up for this purpose.
As for hacking - there’ll be plenty of dedicated time and deep data. We’ll go into that in the next email, which will have a few of our project ideas and the data sources we’ve been wrangling together (and hopefully be followed by a few of your own).
This being The New York Public Library, while not required for every project, we really feel it imperative that at least some of the work we do faces and engages the public around historical data. Public-facing prototypes are the highest form of flattery for The Library.
One last very important thing: On Monday afternoon at 4:30, we’ll be having a half-hour call going over a of the ideas and data. The more of you join into the call, the shorter the morning explication will be and the sooner we can get jamming. {UberConference Number: (646) 612-7575 | Open PIN: 82078 | UberConference URL: http://uberconference.com/u/geohack}
Any questions: send 'em along!
Onward!
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Matt Knutzen - Geospatial Librarian
Ben Vershbow - Manager, NYPL Labs
David Riordan - Product Manager, NYPL Labs
Schedule
Day 1 - June 4
9:30 am | Arrive at NYPL, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (42nd St. entrance)
9:45 am | Welcome & orientation (tshirt disbursement seminar)
10:00 am | Intros & track breakouts
10:45 am | APIs & data tour (Gazzy, Repo, newspapers, NYC historical buildings, directories, photos)
11:00 am - 1:00 pm | Thank god we’re finally hacking
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm | Lunch & Lunch Talk 1
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm | hacking & structured yacking
4:00 pm - 4:20 pm | Snacks & snapshots (sharing what we’re up to)
4:20 pm- 7:00 pm | Hacking and unstructured yacking
7:00 pm | social!
Day 2 - June 5
9:30am | Arrive & hack
10:30 am -12:30 pm | Structured yacking & continued hacking
12:00 pm | Lunch arrives
12:30 pm | Topomancy leaves / day 2 talks
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm | hacking & unstructured yacking
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm | Demos & wrapups & hugs