Hack idea

Since January, the copyright-free digitised holdings of the UB Basel have been in the public domain. They may be used without asking and are available to all hackers at the hackathon, too. Altogether that is more than 25,000 available objects! The manuscripts department of the UB has a few ideas about what could be done with this data at the coming hacker weekend and is pleased to present them here.

And of course you are welcome to keep browsing. To do so, please have a look here (e-manuscripta), here (e-rara) or here (e-codices)!

So here are a few ideas…

• How about an anatomical “flip book” from 1619? Which, if you look behind the fig leaf on pages 60/61, also says a great deal about the moral standards of the time: http://www.e-rara.ch/doi/10.3931/e-rara-23167
  
• In addition, the seven-volume work on the structure of the human body by Andreas Vesalius, which founded modern anatomy and is also richly illustrated, is available: http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-20094
  
• The Cosmographia (description of the world) by Sebastian Münster from the 16th century offers, and not only because of its maps, a long-forgotten perspective on the world as it was known at the time, which could be rediscovered with the help of today’s technical possibilities: http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-26355
  
• But there is also a handwritten alchemical collection from 1550 waiting to be turned into gold in whatever form during the hackathon: http://dx.doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-14528
  
• Various caricatures and costume depictions can provide the raw material for creating a panopticon of (alienated?) historical figures in an inviting setting: http://dx.doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-15266, http://dx.doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-15689 and http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-5490
  
• Or perhaps, with a little programming magic, a 16th-century collection of birds can be brought to life through the animal sound archive: http://dx.doi.org/10.7891/e-manuscripta-12849

Incidentally, the bird song data has already been used very impressively at the CodingdaVinci hackathon.

Nightingale and Canary from Andy Thomas on Vimeo.

In any case, we wish you lots of fun browsing and finding ideas, and we look forward to your participation and the results!