Datasets

Here you’ll find details and links to all of the data that has been made available for Culture Hack Scotland.  We think you’ll agree that it’s quite good.  This is a new style of event for the cultural sector here in Scotland so we’re really quite delighted about what we have.

We have listed the data by theme to be as useful as possible.

Edinburgh Festivals-related data

#1 Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals – complete listings API (2010)

The first core data set that we can announce is the full summer Edinburgh festivals listings data for 2010 – which contains listings for six world-class summer festivals:

• the Fringe
• Edinburgh international Festival
• Edinburgh Art Festival
• Edinburgh Mela
• Edinburgh International Book Festival and
• Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival.

Name: 2010 Edinburgh Festivals data provided via festivalslab

#2 Fringe performance master data sheet (2010)

This is an amazing dataset and again, the first time it’s been publicly available.  It is an Excel data sheet that lists all of the 3000 different performers and companies that put on shows at the Fringe in 2010 – which was of course another record-breaking year.  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.

Name: 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe performance data provided via festivalslab

#3 Fringe venue master data sheet (2010)

This is an amazing dataset and another exclusive.  It is an Excel data sheet that lists all of the 250 odd Fringe venues AND their subvenues which taked it up to 354 actual performance spaces.  There are two sheets to the spreadsheet, one has all the main venues with addresses, postcodes, lat/long, accessibility informationa and venue descriptions.  The other sheet has the root venue with sub-venues

Name: 2010 Fringe venue listing provided by festivalslab

#4 Edinburgh International Festival 2011 programme)

EIF are the first of the major summer festivals to announce their programme which is themed around Asia (it’s pretty awesome). We didn’t quite have time to turn it into a JSON/XML endpoint but the Excel spreadsheet is pretty sound

Name: 2011 Edinburgh International Festival programme data

#5 Edinburgh Year-Round Footfall Data

This is a bit of an exclusive so we’re rather pleased about that. This is the first public release of official city footfall data as collected on behalf of the City of Edinburgh Council using technology provided by a company called Springboard. We now have a complete 2010 datasheet here from 19 core city locations.

Name: Footfall data provided by City of Edinburgh Council

#6 Guardian Content API

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. It’s an amazing API.

Data terms of usage as per Guardian API

Museums/collection data

#7 National Museums Scotland

In advance of a fuller collections API which they are planning for later this year, the excellent National Museums Scotland 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.

Name: National Museums of Scotland CHS11 collection data

#8 National Galleries of Scotland

The National Galleries of Scotland 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?

Take a look at the feeds here:
Events: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/rss/events
Exhibitions: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/rss/exhibitions
The Collection: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/rss/works
Portrait of the month: http://www.nationalgalleries.org/rss/portrait_of_the_month
Audio & Video: http://nationalgalleries.org/rss/media

If you use this data, the National Galleries ask that you attribute fully, referring people back to the relevant page on their website. The data is not to be used for third party monetary gain without the express permission of the National Galleries, and the National Galleries reserve the right to ask developers to remove their data from applications if they feel that its use isn’t in the best interests of NGS or the artists represented through the collection.

Name: NGS data
This data is not for commercial use.

#9 National Library of Scotland

Another national organisation join the data party. This time it’s the National Library of Scotland who are bringing their digital archive with them. There are four directories, each containing sets of xml files describing catalogue entries. There’s also a very comprehensive Read Me that you should definitely read. NLS are releasing their content under Creative Commons licenses. The xml files are released under CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication), while the images are released under CC BY-NC 2.5 (Attribution-NonCommercial).

Name: NLS Archive Data

#10 Culture Grid

Search APIs to over 1.2million museum collection records, covering a huge range of collections, topics and periods, including 1.1 million object records from national, regional and local collections. Mainly reference images but also some audio and video; and there are also 1000s of collection and institution records. For #chs11 it now includes 80k items from the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow including 20k images!

Culture Grid offers standards based search APIs to access this wealth of data. These APIs are openly available to encourage innovation and feedback through events such as Culture Hack and the Culture Grid Hack Day – http://www.culturegridhackday.org.uk. 

API usage terms as per Culture Grid website

Publisher’s data

#11 The List

The superb team at The LIST, not only have they played a big role in the development of the IVES venue data format, they have also provided a killer data set.  What they have released for this event is a full set of events for Glasgow in May in the IVES format.

Name: The List data
This data is not for commercial use.

#12 The Skinny

Thanks to the charming folk at The Skinny, Scotland’s largest entertainments & listings magazine, for this next dataset. They’ve given us their events, plus some reviews and previews, all in a couple of handy CSVs. There are even some images to play with.

Name: Skinny listings data #chs11

Scottish arts organisations

#13 National Theatre of Scotland audience & library data

The team at the National Theatre of Scotland have been collecting data since the organisation launched five years ago. Now it’s over to you to find something for them to do with it. They’ve given us a couple of xls files a) detailing audience figures and b) outlining what’s in their library. These aren’t exhaustive, they’re adding and enhancing the whole time, but it’s a good starting point. They’ve also made available a fantastic resource – names and jobs of all the people they’ve worked with on their various shows – their extended family so to speak.

Name: NTS audience & library data #chs11

#14 Glasgow Film

Glasgow Film Theatre and associated festival Glasgow Film Festival have a number of excellent XML feeds available

#15 ARIKA

Next up, some archive data from Arika – undisputed masters of underground music & film festivals. They’ve supplied us with a spreadsheet of content generated by their two 2010 festivals, Instal & KYTN. We’ve also got a few pieces of rich media that correlate with the spreadsheet. Unfortunately, because of copyright issues, we haven’t got ALL the media in time for Culture Hack Scotland. But Arika are aiming to get everything cleared as soon as possible, with a view to getting it online and accessible asap.

Name: Arika Archive Data

#16 NVA Audience Data

NVA are a Glasgow-based organisation who make powerful public art. They engage participants physically and creatively in redefining urban and rural landscapes. They’ve given us extracts of their audience data for you to explore – information about where their audience members are based and which projects they came to see.

You can download the spreadsheets here. There are also some accompanying notes in the zip that you should read.

Name: NVA Audience Data

BBC-related data

#17 Subvertle!

This is was a project started by @ideoforms and others at Culture Hack Day in London and is a framework to access, translate and synthesise BBC iPlayer subtitles.

You can see the codebase at Github here

#18 BBC data feeds

While the mighty BBC Backstage project is no more, do of course remember that many of the feeds that came about as part of that initiative are still available. You can find them all here, but they aren’t all live so pls check them.