Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathons

In this project, we want to connect newspaper articles from Journal de Genève (a Genevan daily newspaper) and the Gazette de Lausanne to a sample of the Diplomatic Documents in Switzerland database (Dodis). The goal is to conduct requests in the Dodis descriptive metadata to look for what appears in a given interval of time in the press by comparing occurrences from both data sets. Thus, we should be able to examine if and how the written press reflected what was happening at the diplomatic level. The time interval for this project is the summer of 1914.

In this context, at first we cleaned the data, for example by removing noise caused by short strings of characters and stopwords. The cleansing is a necessary step to reduce noise in the corpus. We then compared prepared tfidf vectors of words and LSI topics and represented each article in the corpus as such. Finally, we indexed the whole corpus of Le Temps to prepare it for similarity queries. THe last step was to build an interface to search the corpus by entering a text (e.g., a Dodis summary).

Difficulties were not only technical. For example, the data are massive: we started doing this work on fifteen days, then on three months. Moreover, some Dodis documents were classified (i.e. non public) at the time, therefore some of the decisions don't appear in the newspapers articles. We also used the TXM software, a platform for lexicometry and text statistical analysis, to explore both text corpora (the DODIS metadata and the newspapers) and to detect frequencies of significant words and their presence in both corpora.

• demo
• github

Historical playing cards are witnesses of the past, icons of the social and economic reality of their time. On display in museums or stored in archives, ancient playing cards are no longer what they once were meant to be: a deck of cards made for playful entertainment. This project aims at making historical playing cards playable again by means of the well-known solitaire card game "Freecell".

Historical Tarot Freecell 1.1

Tarot Freecell is a fully playable solitaire card game coded in HTML 5. It offers random setup, autoplay, reset and undo options. The game features a historical 78-card deck used for games and divination. The cards were printed in the 1880s by J. Müller & Cie., Schaffhausen, Switzerland.

The cards need to be held upright and use Roman numeral indexing. The lack of modern features like point symmetry and Arabic numerals made the deck increasingly unpopular.

Due to the lack of corner indices - a core feature of modern playing cards - the vertical card offset needs to be significantly higher than in other computer adaptations.

http://hackathon2015.cruncher.ch/

A basic GeoGuesser game using pictures of Lausanne from the 19th century. All images are available on http://musees.lausanne.ch/ and are are part of the Musée Historique de Lausanne Collection.

Idea: Create a database containing all the heritage institutions in Switzerland. For each heritage institution, all collections are listed. For each collection the degree of digitization and the level of openness are indicated: metadata / content available in digital format? available online? available under an open license? etc. - The challenge is twofold: First, we need to find a technical solution that scales well over time and across national borders. Second, the processes to regularly collect data about the collections and their status need to be set up.

National inventories of heritage institutions are created as part of the OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey; there is also a network of national contacts in a series of countries which have been involved in a common data collection exercise.

Port the GLAM inventory to Wikipedia, enrich it with links to existing Wikipedia articles: See
German Wikipedia|Project "Schweizer Gedächtnisinstitutionen in der Wikipedia".
Track the heritage institutions' presence in Wikipedia.
Encourage the Wikipedia community to write articles about institutions that haven't been covered it in Wikipedia.
Once all existing articles have been repertoried, the inventory can be transposed to Wikidata.

(Original working title: Portrait Domain)

This is a concept for an gamified social media platform / art installation aiming to explore alternate identity, reflect on the usurping of privacy through facial recognition technology, and make use of historic digitized photographs in the Public Domain to recreate personas from the past. Since the #glamhack event where this project started, we have developed an offline installation which uses Augmented Reality to explore the portraits. See videos on Twitter or Instagram.

View the concept document for a full description.

• Durheim portraits contributed by the Swiss National Archive

The exhibit gathers data on user interactions with historical portraits, which is combined with analytics from the web application on the Logentries platform:

Launched by loleg at the hackdays, this project has already had over a dozen collaborators and advisors who have kindly shared time and expertise in support. Thank you all!

Please also see the closely related projects picturethis and graphing_the_stateless.