Authors: Ida Ahmad, Rosie Brigham
The recent Heritage Science Hackathon held at UCL Here East on the 18th and 19th of May was a resounding success, organised by Ida Ahmad, Rosie Brigham and Gavin Leong. It brought many people from different backgrounds to work on issues faced by two local heritage institutions. Originally emerging from the tech sector, hackathons are events, usually lasting the weekend, which gather people from across different sectors to compete in teams to create solutions to common problems, in this case, problems faced by the heritage partners.
After an initial ideas and brainstorming session, participants broke up into teams of up to 7 to work on their solutions. Eastside Community Heritage was looking for an effective and sustainable way to open up the Hidden Histories archive whilst Thames Festival Trust asked contestants how they could better collect, map and archive smells and sent memories to assist in their upcoming program The Barking Stink.
Workshops related to the challenges gave attendees the opportunity to delve deeper into some of the scientific and technical aspects of heritage science. Cecilia Bembibre delivered a fantastic hands on workshop that looked at what heritage smells are, and involved asking the groups to model out of playdough the form of the smell in her specially created ‘smell pens’ were. Giles Bergel delivered a similarly interesting talk that looked at the different ways computer vision is being used across digital archives whilst Rosie Brigham taught an introduction to web development, to give a technical edge to any participants who were looking to upskill.
At the end of the second day, each team had to pitch the solutions they had been working on to a panel of judges. In total eight pitches were made, Initially, two prizes were up for grabs; one for the best idea relating to each heritage partner. These were awarded to teams SearchOral and KAD. SearchOral created a scalable and searchable database of transcripts, through which researchers could request access to the Hidden Histories archive. KAD created an innovative way to present heritage smells in their local context in East London using totems. The judges were so impressed by the calibre of all the pitches that they decided to award a third prize to team Aurora, for their plan to create a lightweight device that captured the chemistry of a given smell in real time.
An immensely fun weekend was had by all, and we can highly recommend the format of a hackathon to engage new audiences with issues, and to find solutions, in Heritage Science. It has proved a successful way to bring new ideas into organisations and form new partnerships.
