The Hacks

See the results of The National Archives’ first hack day. 

At the close of the event, 11 teams opted to present. They were:

• Jonathan Tweed and Kai En Ong (with Michael Smethurst, Faith Mowbray and Paul Rissen) produced the winning hack, a website using the @ukwarcabinet twitter feed to help support the exploration of wartime Cabinet Papers.
• Tim Hodson chose to work with SC 1, our collection of “Ancient Correspondence” and his visualisation of medieval power politics won joint second prize.
• Jamie Mahoney also won second prize by producing Show Me the Money, using details of Medieval lenders and debtors in C131. The tool mapped the financial relationships between the individuals featured and included a crowdsourcing tool to improve its own accuracy.
• Crystal and Steven Hirschorn won third prize with a number of visualisations of Olympic data scraped from Wikipedia infoboxes.
• Aleks Drozdov demoed an iPhone app for the Discovery API. This system will likely be deployed in the next year.
• Gwyn Jones and Vitaliy Oliynyk built DiscoVERY Lite, a new interface for interacting with Discovery.
• Peter Camfield worked with our “machinery of government” data to visualise the merging and splitting of government departments over time.
• Sam Mbale used Google Fusion Tables to geoference the ARCHON directory of UK and international archives.
• Jo Pugh georeferenced the Victorian and Edwardian photographers described in the catalogued portion of COPY 1.
• Jannette Mensch worked with the data in HO 144 and gave a presentation where she outlined some of difficulties in working with and interpreting the material. Read her blog on Hack the Record.
• John Cummings continued his quest to find an easy to use online tool for generating online map-based trails with embedded content.

Additionally,

• Matthew Pearce dug into data from dissolved companies in BT 31. Apparently there’s gold in there and he has set about finding it.

We want to thank all who attended, presented and helped to run the event.