* indicates that this data has been made available for the first time thanks to Culture Hack Scotland

Culture Hack Scotland – Handy Data Guide (version 1) An unprecedented amount of cultural data has been made available for this event. You can link to everything listed here via culturehackscotland.com/data. In this document you’ll find out more about what that data is. Some developers have asked us to provide guidance for how this data might be used from the arts/cultural angle. We include pointers on that too, but they’re just suggestions.

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Edinburgh Festivals-related data 1. Complete summer festivals listings API for 2010. This includes listings in a common

format for six world-class festivals: the Fringe, Edinburgh International Festival, Book Festival, Art Festival, Edinburgh Mela and Jazz&Blues Festival. And while it’s last year’s listings data – any exciting projects build on this 2010 data could be taken through to live in 2011.

2. Fringe performance master datasheet*. Excel datasheet that lists all of the 3000 different performers and companies that put on shows in 2010. There are two sheets to the spreadsheet, one has all the UK companies and the other the International companies – all marked with country of origin.

3. Fringe venue master datasheet*. An Excel data sheet that lists all of the 250+Fringe venues AND their subvenues which takes it up to 354 actual performance spaces. There are two sheetst, one has all the main venues with addresses, postcodes, lat/long, accessibility information and venue descriptions. The other sheet lists the root venue with sub-venues.

4. Edinburgh International Festival 2011*. This is the first of the summer festivals to announce their programme. There wasn’t quite time to turn it into a JSON and XML endpoint but we do have it as an ol’fashioned Excel datasheet.

5. Edinburgh City Footfall Data*. This is the first public release of official city footfall data as collected on behalf of the City of Edinburgh Council. This Excel spreadsheet lists complete all 365 days in 2010 data in 19 core city locations.

6. Guardian API and festival content. The Guardian have set up a special key on their superb OpenPlatform API called chdscot which has unlimited calls (limited to 30/sec). They are especially interested in hacks built using their festival content and you can find some 3140 Edinburgh festivals-related content pieces using calls like http://content.guardianapis.com/search?tag=culture/edinburghfestival&format=json. There are many other calls that you might use too.

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What might be done with it? The Edinburgh Festivals have unique scale and diversity - as you’ll know first-hand. This presents a number of real challenges such as:

• Visitors need to find the right shows – but they want some serendipity in there too • Can festival data be combined with other data/APIs e.g. location services? • Can going from A-to-B be more fun/playful/artful and more than just a walk? • How can visitors make sense of social media noise at peak festival times? • Can we help visitors make meaningful social connections while in Edinburgh? • What services and tools can be provided for people with access/disability issues? • How can we reduce environmental impact?

* indicates that this data has been made available for the first time thanks to Culture Hack Scotland

Museums/collections data

7. National Museums Scotland*. NMS have provided a set of 1066 records from their database. The records don’t currently include images or URLs but they do provide a wealth of other information and provide insight into the data associated with an item in the NMS collection. The records are available as CSV, XLS and XML.

8. National Galleries of Scotland. NGS have a series of RSS feeds available on their website that they’re keen to see used in new, innovative and stimulating ways. What can you do with their events, exhibitions & online collections?

9. National Library of Scotland*. NLS have provided access to four large image collections with associated data from their digital archive.

10. Culture Grid*. Culture Grid is an amazing API of UK collections data which is ever growing. It contains LOADS of items from across Scotland and over 1.2M from across many collections in the UK. And for #chs11 they have released 80k records from the Hunterian museum in Glasgow – including 20k with images. All available through an API on their site.

Publishers’ listings data

11. The List*. This fine publication has provided a full set of listings for all events in Glasgow in May in the very handy IVES format.

12. The Skinny*. Another great publication, the Skinny have a series of CSVs containing reviews, previews and listings as well as some images.

Scottish Arts Organisations data

13. National Theatre of Scotland*. Excel files featuring audience numbers for the full range of NTS shows, plus a library inventory. Also available, a spreadsheet with details of all the freelancers & associates NTS have worked with across Scotland since launching 5 years ago.

14. Glasgow Film Theatre/Festival. XML feeds with listings information for this terrific cinema and their annual festival.

15. ARIKA*. This is a mini-snapshot of Arika’s audio visual archive, a spreadsheet of content from their two 2010 festivals - Instal and KYTN - with some associated rich media files. Please note, Arika are working to clear all media for use online by the start of 2012, but at the moment can’t release all content due to copyright issues.

16. NVA*. Extracts of audience data for award-winning organisation NVA’s full inventory of public art / environmental projects, in Excel format.

BBC-related data

17. Subvertle! A hack by @ideoforms et al at Culture Hack Day in London which allows you to access, translate and synthesise BBC iPlayer subtitles. All code on github.

18. BBC Feeds. Initiated by the BBC Backstage project (RIP), there are still many live feeds providing BBC data.

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A Nice Note About Data Licensing All the organisations who have provided data for #chs11 have done so with great generosity. For many this is the first time they have done anything like this. We therefore ask politely that all projects clearly attribute whichever data source(s) are used. The general license under which the data has been provided is the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence unless otherwise stated. Correct attribution is really important - it makes it more likely that cultural organisations will become increasingly involved in events like this and other open data approaches in the future, an outcome we all want.