Art Bytes: use the Walters Art Museum’s API at this weekend’s hackathon

Art Bytes, the hackathon inside the Walters Art Museum in Mount Vernon, kicks off for the second time this Friday evening.
The first Art Bytes took place in summer 2012, and eight different projects for integrating the artwork of the Walters into a variety of technological tools — miniaturized 3D prints of full-size sculptures, apps for placing works of art within the historical context during which they were created — were made, as Technical.ly Baltimore reported.
New to this year’s Art Bytes hackathon is the Walters Art Museum’s API, which launched in early January and allows “developers and software programmers to query data from the museum, whose Internet repository contains more than 10,000 digital records of art and artifacts from the museum’s collection.”
Access the Walters’ API here.
The records include both information about the artwork in the museum and digital images, and the Walters is at the forefront of this intersection between art and tech. Since 2012, the Walters has uploaded more than 19,000 images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons.
Recently gb.tc invited Dylan Kinnett, the manager of web and social media at the Walters Art Museum, on its Baltimore Weekly podcast to talk about the second Art Bytes.
RSVP for free for the Art Bytes hackathon.
As Kinnett said in his interview with gb.tc, the Walters is looking for this weekend’s hackers to devise ways to connect this large digital repository of information and images with museum-goers as they walk through the Walters’ different exhibitions.
Watch gb.tc’s interview with Dylan Kinnett: