Wuthering Hacks Projects
Posted on 17th Jun 2016 by James
Wuthering Hacks took place at City Library on 9th April 2016 as part of the Commons are Forever series of events.
City Library set up a wi-fi box to serve the data:
The projects included…
Book Recognition
Alistair McDonald used image recognition and a web speech API so that when you scan the barcode of a book with your device’s camera it reads the summary out loud.
(Video: Product Forge)
Map Exploration
Luke Burton used Maptiler and superimposed an historic map of the City onto a current one.
(Video: Product Forge)
Graphed Comparisons
Brian Degger looked at:
- Library PC use (related to pcs at the location*reported use)
- Max, min and average % use
- Visits 2008-2016
- Yearly visits
- Issued items (in 2015/16 20% of 97/98 levels)
- How many fiction books are withdrawn vs non-fiction
Historic Book Conversions
James Rutherford converted mixed scans of historic books into a web-accessible format.
Analysis of Energy Usage
Graham Smith looked at energy consumption (electricity, gas and water) for the City Library building from 2011 to 2015. He also used several projection methods to predict future energy use.
Data Critique
Siddhant Baviskar provided constructive feedback on the data sets.
Raw Visualisations
The participant used Raw to do visualisations using the “top 5 most borrowed titles in Newcastle Libraries in March 2016” data. The idea was to see how data could be turned from a raw format into an aesthetically pleasing item.
Computer Usage
The participant used Libre Office to create the graphs and was interested to see if people would ‘self serve’ if there were lots of computers available. “I never got far enough to answer it though”.
Data Dashboard
(Image: Dave Rowe)
Dave Rowe built a data dashboard showing our issues (number of items borrowed), visits (number of visitors) and PC usage statistics for all our libraries – view the data dashboard here.
Active Members Map
(Image: Dave Rowe, using Newcastle City Council data, CartoDB and OpenStreetMap – Ordnance Survey and Geolytix)
Dave Rowe used the data we released about our members to show on a map of the UK where Newcastle Libraries members live (for anonymisation purposes, only the first part of the postcode was released). View the full map here.
Further Information
Next
The City Library will host their next event on Saturday 13th August. Mark your diary!