Cross-Institutional Cultural Data Hackathon – CultureDataLab 2025
- Hosting organisations
- natural history museum vienna (NHM)
- Responsible persons
- Philip Fischer, Julian Palacz, and Daniela Apaydin
- Start
- End
The project “KulturDatenLab 2025 – Cross-Institutional Cultural Data Hackathon,” also known as “Hack the Pool 2025,” is an innovative pilot initiative that brings together stakeholders from the Digital Humanities (DH) community in Austria. Its primary goal is to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration between research, technology, and memory institutions while promoting the use of digital resources and methods. The event aligns with the core guidelines of the Digital Humanities Austria Strategy 2021+, including fostering national networking, supporting early-career researchers, and implementing open science principles. By creatively engaging with open cultural data from Austrian memory institutions, the project makes a significant contribution to the advancement of Digital Humanities in Austria and beyond.
Project Information
The hackathon “Hack the Pool 2025” was organized by the Natural History Museum Vienna in collaboration with the CLARIAH-AT consortium and partner institutions of the Kulturpool. The event took place on September 25 and 26, 2025, at the premises of the Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media, and Sports in Vienna. Over 35 participants from diverse fields, such as Digital Humanities, technology, and memory institutions, formed five interdisciplinary teams to work on specific quests and develop innovative prototypes.
The projects included augmented reality tours, AI-driven data linking, and visualizations. The teams developed five innovative prototypes that vividly demonstrate the scope and potential of Digital Humanities:
- ThanaPool: A project focused on AI-driven data linking, making archaeological data accessible in new ways.
- Schneckenhaus der Natur (“Nature’s Snail Shell”): An augmented reality tour that allows users to interactively explore rare snail species.
- Zeitensprung (“Time Leap”): A tool for data exploration and visualization that connects historical events and datasets.
- Kulturpool Kompass (“Cultural Pool Compass”): A web portal designed to facilitate navigation through open cultural data.
- ViennaQuiz: An interactive quiz that playfully conveys knowledge about cultural data.
The hackathon results were published under a free MIT license and are accessible in a public code repository. Each project includes a citable README.md file for documentation, ensuring the reusability and sustainability of the outcomes. Additionally, a follow-up network was established to provide long-term support for the initiatives that emerged. “Hack the Pool 2025” has become a blueprint for future hackathons using Kulturpool data, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary exchange and creative data work.
The project KulturDatenLab 2025, or “Hack the Pool 2025,” demonstrates impressively how open data and interdisciplinary collaboration can sustainably enrich the field of Digital Humanities.