eCultureSA

Team Name

Data Geeks - eCultureSA

Team Members

Project Description

This project addresses the Digital culture challenge, which asks how our digital cultural heritage collections can be made more engaging for online audiences.

Data Story

We believe there is an enormous amount of data made available to the public, through institutions such as the state library, and the South Australian museum, but it's not sufficient for it to just be out there, as very few people will interact with it or search for it. We think the key to get modern audiences interested in people who lived over a hundred years ago is to find a way for them to see that they were just like us. In this project, we focus on the locations. They lived in the same places as us, walked and shopped just like us.

We have created an app which will engage south australians with a series of challenges which will encourage them to get out there and engage directly with our states heritage. Going to a prototype of our app, there are options to click into different challenges. An example of such is a scavenger hunt. The challenge is to take a photo at the same angle so that they can be compared side to side and it’s clear the photos are of the same place, separated by time. Clicking into the scavenger hunt shows a map with a timer for how long the hunt will go for. There will be a point system spanning the entire app, and other gamification elements to further help engage users. Challenge data will be drawn from various government sources, such as the state library.

The scavenger hunt is a timed challenge, though most will not be on most of the time. For something available all the time, consider instead a “Histroical faces” challenge, which might for instance quiz users on the lives of the early colonisers of our state.

Multiple sources have been used for our prototype, including sahistoryhub and data.sa, though many more could be drawn upon such as museum data on where fossils and meteorites have been discovered, for a geocaching-like challenge.

Our prototype has been developed in the javascript framework angular, and, while incomplete, the code so far has been posted to github to serve as a guide for a more complete implementation. A live demo has also been provided, so check it out!