Recently Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) has conducted a hackathon. As the website says:
“To celebrate the 120th birthday of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art is opening up its collection data in a weekend-long hackathon that brings together arts, technology, and education communities. The museum will make data available on the 30,000-plus artworks in its collection in an effort to inspire innovative thinking about the various ways such data can be used. The three-day event provides developers and designers tools and data for teams or individuals to help the museum reimagine its collection and enrich the museum experience.”
The collection data is available here
For the hackathon, I have developed an application that will help a museum visitor to explore and track progress based on physical location, while moving around the museum. The museum’s floor plan is here – museum is divided into floors, which have galleries and sub-galleries. The idea is as following:
- present a hierarchical view of the physical locations;
- correlate each location with sub-galleries and the art collection at that location;
- provide ability to preview/explore the artwork at each location;
- ability to mark each location as complete;
- show percentage complete.
At the at end of the visit, a visitor knows if she covered everything or not. If combined with social media, this can generate a discussion on the artwork, how long it takes to explore, where a visitor has spent more time and why etc. Possibly, the idea can be extended to combine along with multiple Carnegie Museums.
Since hackthon work had to be completed in 2 days, there was no time for all the intended features and styling etc., but I want to use what I have done as a base to improve upon it in a series of blogs. I have not yet put the code in github, but will do so in bits and pieces, as I keep adding along with the posts. Please give your suggestions for features or design, frontend interface, what other approaches/tools/libraries could be used etc.
The application uses Java frameworks/libraries, JSF/PrimeFaces and PostgreSQL. It is deployed on tomcat.
Here are some screenshots from what I presented at the hackathon:
Scrollable preview at each location (can be expanded/collapsed):
Progress tracking:
