Hacathon Hanes 2026

History Hackathon 2026 Where?: National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth When?: 20 February, 10am - 3pm Contact: Jason Evans (jje(at)llgc.org.uk) Cost: Free How to attend?: Register Bring:: Laptop and Enthusiasm

Themes

The History Hackathon will be a hack day which focuses on reusing historical data about Wales and its people from the National Library of Wales. This will include 1000's of biographical records, digital images, newspapers, The 1923 Womens Peace Petition, OCR data and much more.

Hacking can include programming, data visualisation, gamification, The use of AI models and tools, creative and artistic reuse and much more!

It is a free event, with free lunch and T-Shirt for all those who attend!

Data available now

• CHAIN meteorlogical observations. Victorian era daily temperature and pressure observations with diary entries. JSON files with IIIF manifests, CSV of combined Min/Max temperature readings. *This data is crowdsourced and contains multiple errors, such as duplicate dates with different temperature values, which should be considered when undertaking any analysis.
• Welsh Journals and Newspapers text annotated with suggested entities sqlite
• SNARC Wikibase - A Wikibase for Welsh name authority with over 100,000 linked people, places and organizations in Welsh heritage data.
• Datasets on Wikidata
• Probate records CSV
• Aberystwyth Shipping Records CSV - Records of 19th century merchant ships and their crew, including details of journeys made. This data would be great for making interesting visualsations..like this one
• Basic data for Welsh Biography CSV, JSON, HTML
• Detailed data for the Welsh Biography CSV, JSON, HTML
• IIIF manisfests for NLW images on Wikidata CSV, JSON, HTML
• Welsh WWI Book of remembrance data JSON - Welsh Book of Remembrance List of 35,000 men and women from Wales who lost their lives in WWI
• Cardiganshire War tribunals data JSON - Cardiganshire War tribunals Records of appeals against enforced inscription into the army during WWI for the county of Cardiganshire. These include personal information, earnings, tribunal decisions ect.
• Welsh Crime and punishment database CSV, JSON
• Supplementary Aberystwyth Shipping records data (Journeys taken) JSON
• Bardic Data. A record of every person admintted to the Gorsedd JSON
• IIIF Images - A list of 30,000 Digital images CSV with internat PID for accessing IIIF manifests and a Wikidata ID for depicted entities.
• NLW Openly licenced Images on Wikimedia Commons (150k)

Data available on the day

• The Welsh Women's Peace Petition.

We will give access to a sample of the data for the Women's peace petition, currently being transcribed by volunteers

• All Welsh newspapers online data.

We will give full access to the text of 16 million pages of historical Welsh newspapers via an API.

• Welsh Tithe Map Data
• Tile server API

The output of one of Wales largest crowd sourcing projects the API will give access to nearly a million records of place names, tennants and landowners.

• Entire text of Welsh Wikipedia (JSON)

Or via the API =

1. Go through the Getting Started section of the docs to sign up for an account and use the Login method to get an access_token. Make sure to enter your username all lowercase when using the Login method!
2. Get Structured Contents Snapshot Bundle Info for cywiki. Enter your access token where the code says 'ACCESS_TOKEN':
3. curl -L "https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/snapshots/structured-contents/cywiki_namespace_0" -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN"
4. Download the Structured Contents Snapshot Bundle for cywiki:
5. curl -L "https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v2/snapshots/structured-contents/cywiki_namespace_0/download" -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN"
   
   

Output

Blogs/posts